

v / ' 

’ v'^, - . • • ' ' * 7 ^ . . V ’ «« ’ /, . . . , * 

:, J *%»*.'* A .**' SjHBtoZ* . V A* » ♦.. 


8 I ^ 



✓> <^vi\ 

c b % J 


^ 3 
'/ C* 

. < 

N ( 



* 

Si IK 

"oo^ 

x ATAMj 
O £ 

* ' wbrfjg 

ynl. + \X ' 

J3| ' 'fj \y K 

^ r u. 

» 
v c 

> 

A > 

> 

<*■ ^y// ii 

® * v 0 o 

/ ' Iff > A ^C» .Z' 


,\X> «/> ° 

' * * S " \ A -V* B ,. % *<>« K* ^6’ 

-r ?j> AV ,c oN 

? ^ <j * 

. S, 

•< 




o o 

■> V ' ■£> 


) s s**7-^ iraN0 ° \^ A? c b 

K ^mL // s % v' ***<•/■ > o> s > * * ^ ^ 




>>* 


<• V 

o 0 X 


_ .\^ ^ ° 

0 <° 0 ~ c ( A. ' *” ' ' A « V ■ • , A * 0 ” ' 

0 * -^- ■%_ J? °o 0° . 

. >✓’ 



A c 0 N 0 





>• 1 

* <2y/j0 vT • , > Of* ^ * C z2y/IM > 

%. v^-V 0 ... ,% '*3* / ^ vflVV 

\ ° «J* ° ^ ,^ X * ° <£' to 

^ 2 * 2 * c X 

* •<?’ * •*> 'A' o 

<i- v ✓ ^QtUv*** v c >* * 

< ^ .*S' A A vl , ^ '< 

-f ^ o' 0 ^ >* °o 


J>' <v ° \ 






o N c O 
V ^ °_ *< *f. 




' <£u <A 

° V 


«y A *A- ■/■ ^L ;l \\vSSii ~ o^ 

V^>° s .. , V’-^‘V , . . %*-•’* 

> Sy * s ** c? v ^ 0 ' ^ 

A ♦ * <<> v* * dV^A* r ’ ’K<U C- 

^ ° w 1 « f -. A# .r v 1 -%f 

* * 'V >*, -> ^ ;. ~Y' , -V ^ Y 

'V ..... 

‘ *"^’- 0 .-»&-' % ■»* .' 

Cl O » 




^ ■% 


■ ° ^ * ‘zm* * 0 

v # V-t-'/ s ,. 

* V V * ' * <Y > A 0 k ^ _ 

v; - " m’' ^' : 'Vi' 1 ^' * 

•a v»- y '^J w&tv' v a ^ f 

■*, i\~ s* o c A, O ■/ „ , 

c 0 NC ^ r 0 V ‘ C 

L> *»■ e-cA'w i 

.'*■^01' ^ 

* 1 *> 

l> 



X 00 ^. 


- d- t zs/Z 

r> ^ ^ 

* 

\ ( 

> » , 

_ j> A ' 

1 V N. 

y' 


r ‘ <>*a 



A. ,/> ^ ? 

V. 0^1 
y -i> o 1 

c£\ o 


^ y 0 * 

^ C 0 ' * c 


* yV ^ *, 


c A 





























F . 

. 






































































' 










































Daisy Miller 


BY HENRY JAMES, JR., ILL US- 

W 

TRATED FROM DRAWINGS 
BY HARRY W. McVICKAR 



HARPER & BROTHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 



Copyright, 1878, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 


Copyright, 1906, by Henry James. 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



r > 


» . ' 



PAGE 


Frontispiece .... 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

l 

Heading. Part I. . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

3 

Little Polish Boy . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

5 

Winterbourne 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

9 

French Waiter 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

12 

“If you eat three lumps” . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

16 

Randolph and his Alpenstock 

• 

. 

• 

• 

• 

• 

21 

On the Lake .... 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 


25 

Randolph alone 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 


28 

Alpenstock .... 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 


31 

Papa Miller! .... 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

36 

Hotels Daisy stopped at 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

41 

Geneva . .... 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

45 

Chillon 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

48 

Old Castles .... 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

51, 53 

54 

At the Boat-landing 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 


57 

Crest of Switzerland 

• 

9 

m 

• 

• 

• 

59 

Finis. Part I. 


• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

61 

Heading. Part II. Rome . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

63 

One of Mrs. Walker’s Guests . 


• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

66 

Violin 



• 

• 

• 

• 

68 

Winterbourne’s Idea of Daisy Miller 




• 


71 

“The best place we saw is the City of Richmond ” 



74 

Decoration .... 


• 

• 

• 



76 

Mr. Giovanelli 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 


79 

The Pope’s Arms . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

81 

A Corner in Rome 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

84 

A Quill-driver’s Tools . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

87 

Tubes 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

90 

Mrs. Walker .... 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

93 


7 


Rood-screen in Old Church . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

PAGE 

. 97 

The Flag of Italy . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

.. 100 

An Incense-burner 

• 

• 

• 

• 

. 103 

Decoration (Cardinal’s Hat) . 

• 

• 

• 

• 

. 106 

Mrs. Costello 

• 

• 

• 

• 

. 109 

A Bit of a Roman Garden 

• 

• 

• 

• 

. Ill 

Arch of Constantine 

• 

• 

• 

• 

. 115 

Decoration 


• 

• 

• 

. 119 

Colosseum (the Deadly Miasma!) 

• 

• 

• 

• 

. 122 

Eugenio 

• 

• 

• 

• 

. 125 

Requiem 

• 

• 

• 

• 

. 127 

Daisy’s Grave 


• 

• 

• 

. 131 


INTRODUCTION 


In reprinting this exquisite classic the pub- 
lishers have honored me by wishing me to 
preface the little book with some passages 
from an old essay of mine expressive of my 
sense of its unique value. They have thought 
also that in this hour of the immeasurable 
loss which literature has sustained through 
the author’s death, I might find it fit to testify 
my admiration of all his work, and so, as it 
were, bring my criticism up to date. But in 
eternity there are no dates; all moments are 
contemporaneous, and I could add nothing 
now to the witness I have always borne to 
my belief in that immortality of his on which 
he entered long ago. 

I might speak of my personal grief for the 
earthly ending of a friendship which began 
half a hundred years ago; but that could 
effect nothing where all tears were in vain. 
It is the fate of most novelists to be associated 
in the minds of readers with a certain type of 
heroine, or with a single heroine. If it is a 
type that represents the novelist he is not 
unfairly used; for the type may be varied 
into distinctive characters; if it is a single 
vii 


character it seems not so just, for every 
novelist has invented many characters. Mr. 
Henry James, for instance, has given us more, 
and more finely, yet strongly, differenced 
heroines than any novelist of his time, but at 
the mention of his name a single creation of 
his will come so prominently to mind that 
Daisy Miller will for the moment make us 
forget all her sisters. 

Mr. James’s time is still ours, and while 
perfect artistry is prized in literature, it is 
likely to be prolonged indefinitely beyond our 
time. But he belongs pre-eminently to that 
period following the Civil War when our 
authorship felt the rising tide of national life 
in an impulse to work of the highest refine- 
ment, the most essential truth. The tend- 
ency was then toward a subtile beauty, 
which he more than any other American 
writer has expressed in his form, and toward a 
keen, humorous, penetrating self-criticism, 
which seized with joy upon the expanding 
national life, and made it the material of 
fiction as truly national as any yet known. 
“The finer female sense,” in whose favor the 
prosperity of our fiction resides, Mr. James 
lastingly piqued, and to read him if for noth- 
ing but to condemn him is the high intellectual 
experience of the daughters of mothers whose 
indignant girlhood resented while it adored 
viii 


his portraits of American women. To enjoy 
his work, to feel its rare excellence, both in 
conception and expression is a brevet of in- 
tellectual good form which the women who 
have it prize at all its worth. 

Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the 
international novel, but he is the inventor, 
beyond question, of the international Amer- 
ican girl. He recognized and portrayed the 
innocently adventuring, unconsciously pericu- 
lant American maiden, who hastened to efface 
herself almost as soon as she saw herself in 
that still flattering if a little mocking mirror, 
so that between two sojourns in Europe, a 
decade apart, she had time to fade from the 
vision of the friendly spectator. In 1860-70, 
you saw her and heard her everywhere on the 
European continent; in 1870-80, you sought 
her in vain amidst the monuments of art, or on 
the misty mountain-tops, or at the tables 
d’hote. Her passing might have been the 
effect of a more instructed civilization, or it 
might have been a spontaneous and voluntary 
disappearance. In any case she was gone, 
and it seemed a pity, for she was sweet, and 
harmless, with a charm derived from our 
earth and sky, a flavor of new-world condi- 
tions imparting its wilding fragrance to that 
strange environment as freely as to its native 
air. I could well fancy her discoverer feeling 
ix 


a pang of desolation to find no longer in the 
living world this lovely creature, who perished 
as it were of her own impossibility, and whose 
faded ghost has no habitat but in his faithful 
page. 

It is a curious and interesting fact of 
Mr. James’s literary fortunes that in his short 
stories — one is obliged to call them stories for 
want of a more closely fitting word — rather 
than his more extended fictions are the heroes 
and the heroines we know him best by. He 
has the art of so environing the slightest 
presentment of female motive that it shows 
life-size in the narrow space of a sketch or 
study; and you remember such a picture with 
a fullness of detail and a particularity wanting 
to many colossal figures. You seem in the 
retrospect to have lived a long time with the 
pictures, looks, attitudes; phrases remain with 
you; and when you revert to the book you 
do not lose this sense of rich amplitude. 

No other novelist has approached Mr. 
James in his appreciation of women, and in 
his ability to suggest the charm which is 
never wholly absent from women, whether 
they are good, bad, or indifferent in looks or 
behavior. Take all the other men that have 
written novels in English and match their 
women with his, and they seem not to have 
written of women at all. A few women may 
x 


vie with him in the portrayal of a few figures; 
Jane Austen may, and Fanny Burney, and 
Miss Edgeworth, and George Eliot, and the 
Brontes, and Mrs. Humphry Ward; but 
their heroines are as much outnumbered by 
his as the novelists are in every other way 
surpassed. The fact is not affected by the 
want of general recognition; it is not yet 
known to the ignorant masses of educated 
people that Mr. James is one of the greatest 
masters of fiction who has ever lived. It is 
because he has worked in a fashion of his 
own, in regions of inquiry not traversed by 
the herd of adventurers, and dealt with ma- 
terial not exploited before that he is still to 
the critical Jews a stumbling-block and to the 
critical Greeks foolishness. But time will 
inevitably care for this unrivalled artist, or 
this unique psychologist who deals artist-wise 
with his knowledge of human nature; and 
he will yet take that eminent place for which 
he has no rival. 

I cannot, in thinking of him and his some- 
what baffling failure of immediate acceptance, 
promise myself that his right will be acknowl- 
edged soon; his own generation, in its superior 
refinement, was better fitted to appreciate 
him than the present period coarsened and 
vulgarized by the prevalence of puerile ro- 
mance; and yet if his earliest masterpiece had 
xi 


been offered to this thicker-witted time, I 
doubt if it would have suffered the same in- 
justice which it met from a more enlightened 
tribunal, or at least the same kind of injustice. 
It is pathetic to remember how r Daisy 
Miller” was received, or rather rejected, as 
an attack on American girlhood, and yet it is 
perfectly intelligible that it should have been 
taken so by Americans who had still a country 
to be so ipclusively proud of that they could 
not bear the shadow of question to fall upon 
any phase of it. Our political descent to the 
European level has not only thickened our 
skins, but it has in a manner so broadened, 
though it has imbruted our minds, that if she 
could have come again we should see Daisy 
Miller’s innocent freedom in the face of im- 
memorial convention with the liberal and 
tolerant pleasure which the English at once 
felt in it. We should not be blinded to her 
charm, or to the subtile patriotism which 
divined and portrayed it, by a patriotism 
which, if fervent and generous, was not so 
subtile as the author’s. But as I have said, 
Daisy Miller cannot come again. The very 
conditions that would render us patient of 
her now have rendered her impossibility im- 
possible. It is a melancholy paradox, but 
we need not be inconsolable, for though she has 
perished forever from the world, we have her 
xii 


spiritual reflex still vivid in the sensitive 
mirror which caught with such accuracy her 
girlish personality while it still walked the 
earth in the dusty ways of European travel. 

The story of Daisy Miller is as slight as 
Mr. James delights to make the frame of his 
picture, which depends so very little for its 
quality upon the frame. She is first seen at 
Vevey in Switzerland, with her young but 
terribly mature little brother and their mother, 
a little, lonely American group in the rather 
impertinent custody of a courier whom they 
make their domestic if not social equal; and 
she is seen last at Rome (where indeed she 
dies of the fever) the wonder of the inter- 
national and the opprobrium of the corn- 
patriotic society. Such drama as arises from 
the simple circumstances precipitates itself 
in a few spare incidents which, in the retro- 
spect, dwindle to nothing before the superior 
interest of the psychology. A girl of the later 
eighteen-seventies, sent with such a mother 
as hers to Europe by a father who remains 
making money in Schenectady, after no more 
experience of the world than she had got in 
her native town, and at a number of New 
York dinners among people of like tradition; 
uncultivated but not rude, reckless but not 
bold, inexpugnably ignorant of the con- 
ventionally right, and spiritedly resentful of 


control by criterions that offend her own 
sense of things, she goes about Europe doing 
exactly what she would do at home, from an 
innocence as guileless as that which shaped her 
conduct in her native town. She knows no 
harm and she means none; she loves life, and 
talking, and singing, and dancing, and “at- 
tentions,” but she is no flirt, and she is 
essentially and infinitely far from worse. Her 
whole career, as the reader is acquainted with 
it, is seen through the privity of the young 
Europeanized American who meets her at 
Vevey and follows her to Rome in a fascination 
which they have for each other, but which is 
never explicitly a passion. This side of the 
affair is of course managed with the fine 
adroitness of Mr. James’s mastery; from the 
first moment the sense of their potential love 
is a delicate pleasure for the reader, till at the 
last it is a delicate pang, when the girl has 
run her wild gantlet and is dead not only of 
the Roman fever but of the blows dealt her in 
her course. There is a curious sort of fatality 
in it all. She is destined by innate and 
acquired indiscipline to do the things she 
does; and she is not the less doomed to suf- 
fer the things she suffers. In proportion to 
the offence she gives by her lawless innocence 
the things she does are slight things, but their 
consequences break her heart, and leave the 


reader’s aching, as Winterbourne’s must have 
ached life-long. 

The perfection of the workmanship in this 
little book could not be represented without 
an apparent exaggeration which would wrong 
its scrupulous but most sufficient expression. 
If no word could be spared without in some 
degree spoiling it, none could be added with- 
out cumbering its beauty with a vain decora- 
tion. To quote from it at all is to wish to 
quote it all; and one resigns one’s self the 
more easily to the impossibility of giving a 
notion of the perfection of the performance in 
view of the impossibility of imparting a due 
sense, at second hand, of the loveliness and 
truth of the conception. 

The reader must go to the book for both, 
and when he has read it I think he will agree 
with me that never was any civilization of- 
fered a more precious tribute than that which 
a great artist paid ours in the character of 
Daisy Miller. But our civilization could not 
imagine the sincerity in which the tribute was 
offered. It could not realize that Daisy 
Miller was presented in her divine innocence, 
her inextinguishable trust in herself and others, 
as the supreme effect of the American attitude 
toward womanhood. 

W. D. Howells. 


xv 



















T the little town of Yevay, in 
Switzerland, there is a particular- 
ly comfortable hotel. There 
are, indeed, many hotels ; for 
the entertainment of tourists 
is the business of the place, 
which, as many travellers will 
remember, is seated upon the edge of 
a remarkably blue lake — a lake that it 
behooves every tourist to visit. The 
shore of the lake presents an unbroken 
array of establishments of this order, 
of every category, from the “grand ho- 
tel ” of the newest fashion, with a chalk- 
white front, a hundred balconies, and a 


dozen flags flying from its roof, to the 
little Swiss pension of an elder day, with 
its name inscribed in German -looking 
lettering upon a pink or yellow wall, and 
an awkward summer-house in the angle 
of the garden. One of the hotels at Ye - 
vay, however, is famous, even classical, 
being distinguished from many of its up- 
start neighbors by an air both of luxury 
and of maturity. In this region, in the 
month of June, American travellers are 
extremely numerous ; it may be said, in- 
deed, that Vevay assumes at this period 
some of the characteristics of an Ameri- 
can watering-place. There are sights and 
sounds which evoke a vision, an echo, of 
Newport and Saratoga. There is a flit- 
ting hither and thither of “ stylish” young 
girls, a rustling of muslin flounces, a rat- 
tle of dance-music in the morning hours, 
a sound of high-pitched voices at all times. 
You receive an impression of these things 
at the excellent inn of the Trois Cou- 
ronnes, and are transported in fancy to 
the Ocean House or to Congress Hall. 
But at the Trois Couronnes, it must be 
added, there are other features that are 
much at variance with these suggestions : 
neat German waiters, who look like see- 


4 




retaries of legation 


Russian 


processes sitting in the garden ; little 
Polish boys walking about, held by the 
hand, with their governors ; a view of 
the sunny crest of the Dent du Midi 
and the picturesque tow 
ers of the Castle of Chil 
Ion. 

I hardly know whether 
it was the analogies or the 
differences that were uppermost in the 
mind of a young American, who, two or 
three years ago, sat in the garden of the 
Trois Couronnes, looking about him, rath- 
er idly, at some of the graceful objects I 
have mentioned. It was a beautiful sum- 
mer morning, and in whatever fashion 
the young American looked at things 
they must have seemed to him charming. 
He had come from Geneva the day be- 
fore by the little steamer to see his aunt, 
who was staying at the hotel — Geneva 
having been for a long time his place of 
residence. But his aunt had a headache 
— his aunt 


had almost 
always a 
headache — - 
and now she 



was shut up in her room, smelling cam- 
phor, so that he was at liberty to wander 
about. He was some seven-and-twenty 
years of age. When his friends spoke of 
him, they usually said that he was at 
Geneva “studying;” when his enemies 
spoke of him, they said — but, after all, he 
had no enemies ; he was an extremely 
amiable fellow, and universally liked. 
What I should say is, simply, that when 
certain persons spoke of him they affirm- 
ed that the reason of his spending so 
much time at Geneva was that he was 
extremely devoted to a lady who lived 
there — a foreign lady — a person older 
than himself. Yery few Americans — in- 
deed, I think none — had ever seen this 
lady, about whom there were some sin- 
gular stories. But Winterbourne had an 
old attachment for the little metropolis 
of Calvinism ; he had been put to school 
there as a boy, and he had afterwards 
gone to college there — circumstances 
which had led to his forming a great many 
youthful friendships. Many of these he 
had kept, and they were a source of great 
satisfaction t-r> him. 

After knocking at his aunt’s door, and 
learning that she was indisposed, he had 
6 


taken a walk about the town, and then 
he had come in to his breakfast. He had 
now finished his breakfast ; but he was 
drinking a small cup of coffee, which had 
been served to him on a little table in 
the garden by one of the waiters who 
looked like an attache. At last he fin- 
ished his coffee and lit a cigarette. Pres- 
ently a small boy came walking along 
the path — an«urchin of nine or ten. The 
child, who was diminutive for his years, 
had an aged expression of countenance: 
a pale complexion, and sharp little feat- 
ures. He was dressed in knickerbockers, 
with red stockings, which displayed his 
poor little spindle-shanks ; he also wore a 
brilliant red cravat. He carried in his 
hand a long alpenstock, the sharp point 
of which he thrust into everything that 
he approached — the flower-beds, the gar- 
den -benches, the trains of the ladies’ 
dresses. In front of Winterbourne he 
paused, looking at him with a pair of 
bright, penetrating little eyes. 

“ Will you give me a lump of sugar?” 
he asked, in a sharp, hard little voice — a 
voice immature, and yet, somehow, not 
young. 

Winterbourne glanced at the small ta- 

7 


ble near him, on which his coffee-service 
rested, and saw that several morsels of 
sugar remained. “Yes, you may take 
one,” he answered ; “ but I don’t think 
sugar is good for little boys.” 

This little boy stepped forward and 
carefully selected three of the coveted 
fragments, two of which he buried in 
the pocket of his knickerbockers, depos- 
iting the other as promptly in another 
place. He poked his alpenstock, lance- 
fashion, into Winterbourne’s bench, and 
tried to crack the lump of sugar with his 
teeth. 

“ Oh, hlazes ; it’s har-r-d !” he exclaim- 
ed, pronouncing the adjective in a pecul- 
iar manner. 

Winterbourne had immediately pen 
ceived that he might have the honor of 
claiming him as a fellow-countryman. 
“ Take care you don’t hurt your teeth,” 
he said, paternally. 

“ I haven’t got any teeth to hurt. 
They have all come out. I have only 
got seven teeth. My mother counted 
them last night, and one came out right 
afterwards. She said she’d slap me if 
any more came out. I can’t help it. It’s 
this old Europe. It’s the climate that 



makes them 
come out. In 
America they 
didn’t come 
out. It’s these 
hotels.” 

Winterbourne was much amused. “If 
you eat three lumps of sugar, your moth- 
er will certainly slap you,” he said. 

“ She’s got to give me some candy, 

9 


then,” rejoined his young interlocutor. 
“ I can’t get any candy here — any Amer- 
ican candy. American candy ’s the best 
candy.” 

“ And are American little boys the 
best little boys?” asked Winterbourne. 

“I don’t know. I’m an American 
boy,” said the child. 

“ I see you are one of the best !” 
laughed Winterbourne. 

“ Are you an American man ?” pur- 
sued this vivacious infant. And then, 
on Winterbourne’s affirmative reply — 
“ American men are the best !” he de- 
clared. 

His companion thanked him for the 
compliment ; and the child, who had 
now got astride of his alpenstock, stood 
looking about him, while he attacked a 
second lump of sugar. Winterbourne 
wondered if he himself had been like 
this in his infancy, for he had been 
brought to Europe at about this age. 

“Here comes my sister!” cried the 
child, in a moment. “She’s an Ameri- 
can girl.” 

Winterbourne looked along the path 
and saw a beautiful young lady advanc- 
ing. “ American girls are'' the best girls !” 

10 


he said, cheerfully, to his young com- 
panion. 

“ My sister ain’t the best !” the child 
declared. “ She’s always blowing at me.” 

“ I imagine that is your fault, not 
hers,” said Winterbourne. The young 
lady meanwhile had drawn near. She 
was dressed in white muslin, with a hun- 
dred frills and flounces, and knots of 
pale-colored ribbon. She was barehead- 
ed ; but she balanced in her hand a large 
parasol, with a deep border of embroid- 
ery ; and she was strikingly, admirably 
pretty. “ How pretty they are !” thought 
Winterbourne, straightening himself in 
his seat, as if he were prepared to rise. 

The young lady paused in front of his 
bench, near the parapet of the garden, 
which overlooked the lake. The little 
boy had now converted his alpenstock 
into a vaulting-pole, by the aid of which 
he was springing about in the gravel, and 
kicking it up a little. 

“Randolph,” said the young lady, 
“ what are you doing?” 

“ I’m going up the Alps,” replied Ran- 
dolph. “ This is the way !” And he 
gave another little jump, scattering the 
pebbles about Winterbourne’s ears, 
n 



“ That’s the way they come down,” 
said Winterbourne. 

“ He’s an American man !” cried Ran- 
dolph, in his little hard voice. 

The young lady gave no heed 
to this announcement, but looked 
straight at her brother. “Well, I 
guess you had better be quiet,” she 
simply observed. 

It seemed to Winterbourne 
that he had been in a manner 
presented. He got up and 
stepped slowly towards the 
young girl, throwing away his 
cigarette. “ This little boy and 
I have made acquaintance,” he said, 
with great civility. In Geneva, as 
he had been perfectly aware, a young 
> man was not at liberty to speak to a 
young unmarried lady except under cer- 
tain rarely occurring conditions ; but here 
at Yevay, what conditions could be bet- 
ter than these? — a pretty American girl 
coming and standing in front of you in 
a garden. This pretty American girl* 
however, on hearing Winterbourne’s ob- 
servation, simply glanc- 
ed at him ; she then 
turned her head and 



looked over the parapet, at the lake and 
the opposite mountains. He wondered 
whether he had gone too far ; but he de- 
cided that he must advance farther, rath- 
er than retreat. While he was thinking 
of something else to say, the young lady 
turned to the little boy again. 

“ I should like to know where you got 
that pole ?” she said. 

“ I bought it,” responded Randolph. 

“You don’t mean to say you’re going 
to take it to Italy ?” 

“ Yes, I am going to take it to Italy,” 
the child declared. 

The young girl glanced over the front 
of her dress, and smoothed out a knot or 
two of ribbon. Then she rested her eyes 
upon the prospect again. “ Well, I guess 
you had better leave it somewhere,” she 
said, after a moment. 

“Are you going to Italy?” Winter- 
bourne inquired, in a tone of great re- 
spect. 

The young lady glanced at him again. 
“ Yes, sir,” she replied. And she said 
nothing more. 

“Are you — a — going over the Sim- 
plon?” Winterbourne pursued, a little 
embarrassed. 


i3 


/j ‘ I don’t know,” she said. “ I suppose 
it’s some mountain. Randolph, what 
mountain are we going over ?” 

“ Going where ?” the child demanded. 

“ To Italy,” Winterbourne explained. 

“ I don’t know,” said Randolph. “ I 
don’t want to go to Italy. I want to go 
to America.” 

“ Oh, Italy is a beautiful place !” re- 
joined the young man. 

“ Can you get candy there ?” Randolph 
loudly inquired. 

“ I hope not,” said his sister. “ I guess 
you have had enough candy, and mother 
thinks so, too.” 

“ I haven’t had any for ever so long — 
for a hundred weeks !” cried the boy, 
still jumping about. 

The young lady inspected her flounces 
and smoothed her ribbons again, and 
Winterbourne presently risked an obser- 
vation upon the beauty of the view. He 
was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had 
begun to perceive that she was not in 
the least embarrassed herself. There had 
not been the slightest alteration in her 
charming complexion ; she was evidently 
neither offended nor fluttered. If she 
looked another way when he spoke to 

14 


her, and seemed not particularly to hear 
him, this was simply her habit, her man- 
ner. Yet, as he talked a little more, and 
pointed out some of the objects of in- 
terest in the view, with wdiich she appear- 
ed quite unacquainted, she gradually gave 
him more of the benefit of her glance; 
and then he saw that this glance was 
perfectly direct and unshrinking. It 
was not, however, what would have been 
called an immodest glance, for the young 
girl’s eyes were singularly honest and 
fresh. They were wonderfully pretty 
eyes ; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not 
seen for a long time anything prettier 
than his fair countrywoman’s various 
features — her complexion, her nose, her 
ears, her teeth. He had a great relish for 
feminine beauty ; he was addicted to ob- 
serving and analyzing it ; and as regards 
this young lady’s face he made several ob- 
servations. It was not at all insipid, but it 
was not exactly expressive; and though 
it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne 
mentally accused it — very forgivingly— 
of a want of finish. He thought it very 
possible that Master Randolph’s sister was 
a coquette ; he was sure she had a spirit 
of her own ; but in her bright, sweet, 

15 


superficial little visage there was no mock- 
ery, no irony. Before long it became ob- 
vious that she was much disposed towards 
conversation. She told him that they 
were going to Rome for the winter — 
she and her mother and Ran- 
dolph. She asked him if he was 
a “ real American she shouldn’t 
have taken him for one ; he seem- 
ed more like a German — this was 
said after a little hesitation 
— especially when 
he spoke. Winter- 
bourne, laughing, 
answered that he 
had met Ger- 
mans w h o 
spoke like Americans ; but that he had 
not, so far as he remember- 

ed, met an Amer- ^ 
ican who spoke 
like a German. 

Then he asked her if she 
should not be more comfort- 
able in sitting upon the bench which 
he had just quitted. She answered 
that she liked standing up and ’walk- 
ing about ; but she presently sat down. 
She told him she was from New York 
16 




State — “if you know where that is.” 
Winterbourne learned more about her 
by catching hold of her small, slippery 
brother, and making him stand a few 
minutes by his side. 

“ Tell me your name, my boy,” he said. 

“ Randolph C. Miller,” said the boy, 
sharply. “And I’ll tell you her name;” 
and he levelled his alpenstock at his sister. 

“ You had better wait till you are ask- 
ed !” said this young lady, calmly. 

“ I should like very much to know 
your name,” said Winterbourne. 

“ Her name is Daisy Miller !” cried the 
child. “But that isn’t her real name; 
that isn’t her name on her cards.” 

“ It’s a pity you haven’t got one of my 
cards !” said Miss Miller. 

“ Her real name is Annie P. Miller,” 
the boy went on. 

“Ask him his name,” said his sister, 
indicating Winterbourne. 

But on this point Randolph seemed 
perfectly indifferent ; he continued to sup- 
ply information in regard to his own fam- 
ily. “ My father’s name is Ezra B. Mil- 
ler,” he announced. “ My father ain’t in 
Europe ; my father’s in a better place 
than Europe.” 


17 


Winterbourne imagined for a moment 
that this was the manner in which the 
child had been taught to intimate that 
Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere 
of celestial rewards. But Randolph im- 
mediately added, “ My father’s in Sche- 
nectady. He’s got a big business. My 
father’s rich, you bet !” 

“Well!” ejaculated Miss Miller, low- 
ering her parasol and looking at the em- 
broidered border. Winterbourne presently 
released the child, who departed, dragging 
his alpenstock along the path. “ He 
doesn’t like Europe,” said the young girl. 
“ He wants to go back.” 

“ To Schenectady, you mean ?” 

“ Yes ; he w T ants to go right home. 
He hasn’t got any boys here. There is 
one boy here, but he always goes round 
with a teacher ; they wmn’t let him play.” 

“And your brother hasn’t any teacher?” 
Winterbourne inquired. 

“ Mother thought of getting him one 
to travel round with us. There was a 
lady told her of a very good teacher ; an 
American lady — perhaps you know her — 
Mrs. Sanders. I think she came from 
Boston. She told her of this teacher, 
and we thought of getting him to travel 
18 


round with us. But Randolph said he 
didn’t want a teacher travelling round 
with us. He said he wouldn’t have lessons 
when he was in the cars. And we are in 
the cars about half the time. There was 
an English lady we met in the cars — I 
think her name was Miss Featherstone ; 
perhaps you know her. She wanted to 
know why I didn’t give Randolph lessons 
— give him 4 instructions,’ she called it. I 
guess he could give me more instruction 
than I could give him. He’s very smart.” 

“ Yes,” said Winterbourne ; “he seems 
very smart.” 

“ Mother’s going to get a teacher for 
him as soon as we get to Italy. Can you 
get good teachers in Italy ?” 

“ Very good, I should think,” said 
Winterbourne. 

“ Or else she’s going to find some school. 
He ought to learn some more. He’s only 
nine. He’s going to college.” And in 
this way Miss Miller continued to con- 
verse upon the affairs of her family, and 
upon other topics. She sat there with 
her extremely pretty hands, ornamented 
with very brilliant rings, folded in her 
lap, and with her pretty eyes now resting 
upon those of Winterbourne, now wan- 

19 


dering over the garden, the people who 
passed by, and the beautiful view. She 
talked to Winterbourne as if she had 
known him a long time. He found it 
very pleasant. It was many years since 
he had heard a young girl talk so much. 
It might have been said of this unknown 
young lady, who had come and sat down 
beside him upon a bench, that she chat- 
tered. She was very quiet ; she sat in a 
charming, tranquil attitude, but her lips 
and her eyes were constantly moving. 
She had a soft, slender, agreeable voice, 
and her tone was decidedly sociable. She 
gave Winterbourne a history of her move- 
ments and intentions, and those of her 
mother and brother, in Europe, and enu- 
merated, in particular, the various hotels 
at which they had stopped. “That Eng- 
lish lady in the cars,” she said — “ Miss 
Featherstone — asked me if we didn’t all 
live in hotels in America. I told her I 
had never been in so many hotels in my 
life as since I came to Europe. I have 
never seen so many — it’s nothing but 
hotels.” But Miss Miller did not make 
this remark with a querulous accent ; she 
appeared to be in the best humor with 
everything. She declared that the hotels 



were very good, when once you got 
used to their ways, and that Europe 
was perfectly sweet. She was not dis- 
appointed — not a bit. Perhaps it was 
because she had heard so much about 
it before. She had ever so many in- 
timate friends that had been there 
ever so many times. And then she had 
had ever so many dresses and things from 
Paris. Whenever she put on a Paris dress 
she felt as if she were in Europe. 

“It was a kind of a wishing-cap,” said 
Winterbourne. 

“ Yes,” said Miss Miller, without ex- 
amining this analogy ; “ it always 
made me wish I was here. But I 
needn’t have done that for dresses. 

I am sure they send all the pretty 
ones to America; you see the most 
frightful things here. The only 
thing I don’t like,” she proceed- 
ed, “ is the society. There isn’t 
any society ; or, if there is, I don’t 
know where it 


keeps itself. Do 
you? I suppose 
there is some 
society some- 
where, 




but I haven't seen anything of it. I’m 
very fond of society, and I have always 
had a great deal of it. I don’t mean only 
in Schenectady, but in New York. I used 
to go to New York every winter. In 
New York I had lots of society. Last 
winter I had seventeen dinners given 
me; and three of them were by gentle- 
men,” added Daisy Miller. “ I have more 
friends in New York than in Schenecta- 
dy — more gentleman friends; and more 
young lady friends, too,” she resumed in 
a moment. She paused again for an in- 
stant; she was looking at Winterbourne 
with all her prettiness in her lively eyes, 
and in her light, slightly monotonous 
smile. “ I have always had,” she said, 
“ a great deal of gentlemen’s society.” 

Poor Winterbourne was amused, per- 
plexed, and decidedly charmed. He had 
never yet heard a young girl express her- 
self in just this fashion — never, at least, 
save in cases where to say such things 
seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence 
of a certain laxity of deportment. And 
yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller 
of actual or potential inconduite , as they 
said at Geneva? He felt that he had 
lived at Geneva so long that he had lost 
22 


a good deal ; he had become dishabituated 
to the American tone. Never, indeed, 
since he had grown old enough to appre- 
ciate things had he encountered a young 
American girl of so pronounced a type 
as this. Certainly she was very charming, 
but how deucedly sociable ! Was she 
simply a pretty girl from New York 
State ? were they all like that, the pretty 
girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s 
society ? Or was she also a designing, an 
audacious, an unscrupulous young person ? 
Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this 
matter, and his reason could not help him. 
Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely inno- 
cent. Some people had told him that, after 
all, American girls were exceedingly inno- 
cent ; and others had told him that, after 
all, they were not. He was inclined to 
think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt — a 
pretty American flirt. He had never, as 
yet, had any relations with young ladies 
of this category. He had known, here in 
Europe, two or three women — persons 
older than Miss Daisy Miller, and pro- 
vided, for respectability’s sake, with hus- 
bands — who were great coquettes — dan- 
gerous, terrible women, with whom one’s 
relations were liable to take a serious turn. 

23 


But this young girl was not a coquette in 
that sense ; she was very unsophisticated ; 
she was only a pretty American flirt. 
Winterbourne was almost grateful for hav- 
ing found the formula that applied to Miss 
Daisy Miller. He leaned back in his seat ; 
he remarked to himself that she had the 
most charming nose he had ever seen ; he 
wondered what were the regular con- 
ditions and limitations of one’s intercourse 
with a pretty American flirt. It presently 
became apparent that he was on the way 
to learn. 

“Have you been to that old castle?” 
asked the young girl, pointing with her 
parasol to the far-gleaming walls of the 
Chateau de Chillon. 

“ Yes, formerly, more than once,” said 
Winterbourne. “You too, I suppose, have 
seen it ?” 

“ Ho ; we haven’t been there. I want 
to go there dreadfully. Of course I mean 
to go there. I wouldn’t go away from 
here without having seen that old castle.” 

“It’s a very pretty excursion,” said 
Winterbourne, “and very easy to make. 
You can drive or go by the little steamer.” 

“You can go in the cars,” said Miss 
Miller. 


24 


“Yes; you can go in the cars,” Winter- 
bourne assented. 

“ Our courier says they take you right 
up to the castle,” the young girl contin- 
ued. “We were going last week ; but my 
mother gave out. She suffers dreadfully 
from dyspepsia. She said she couldn’t 
go. Randolph wouldn’t go, either ; he 
says he doesn’t think much of old castles. 
But I guess we’ll go this week, if we can 
get Randolph.” 



“ Your brother is 
not interested in an- 
cient monuments?” 
Winterbourne inquired, smil- 
ing. 

“ He says he don’t care 
much about old castles. He’s only nine. 
He wants to stay at the hotel. Mother’s 
afraid to leave him alone, and 
the courier won’t stay with 
him ; so we haven’t been to 
many places. But it will 
be too bad if we don’t go 
up there.” And Miss Mil- 
ler pointed again at the Cha- 
teau de Chillon. 

“I should think it might 
be arranged,” said Winter- 


bourne. “ Couldn’t you get some one to 
stay for the afternoon with Randolph ?” 

Miss Miller looked at him a moment, 
and then very placidly, “ I wish you would 
stay with him !” she said. 

Winterbourne hesitated a moment. “ I 
should much rather go to Chillon with 
y°u.” 

“ With me?” asked the young girl, with 
the same placidity. 

She didn’t rise, blushing, as a young 
girl at Geneva would have done; and yet 
Winterbourne, conscious that he had been 
very bold, thought it possible that she was 
offended. “With your mother,” he an- 
swered, very respectfully. 

But it seemed that both his audacity 
and his respect were lost upon Miss Daisy 
Miller. “ I guess my mother won’t go, 
after all,” she said. “ She don’t like to 
ride round in the afternoon. But did you 
really mean what you said just now, that 
you would like to go up there ?” 

“ Most earnestly,” Winterbourne de- 
clared. 

“ Then we may arrange it. If mother 
will stay with Randolph, I guess Eugenio 
will.” 

“ Eugenio ?” the young man inquired. 

26 


“ Eugenio’s our courier. He doesn’t 
like to stay with Randolph; lie’s the most 
fastidious man I ever saw. But he’s a 
splendid courier. I guess he’ll stay at 
home with Randolph if mother does, and 
then we can go to the castle.” 

Winterbourne reflected for an instant 
as lucidly as possible — “ we” could only 
mean Miss Daisy Miller and himself. This 
programme seemed almost too agreeable 
for credence ; he felt as if he ought to 
kiss the young lady’s hand. Possibly lie 
would have done so, and quite spoiled the 
project ; but at this moment another per- 
son, presumably Eugenio, appeared. A 
tall, handsome man, with superb whiskers, 
wearing a velvet morning-coat and a brill- 
iant watch-chain, approached Miss Miller, 
looking sharply at her companion. “ Oh, 
Eugenio !” said Miss Miller, with the 
friendliest accent. 

Eugenio had looked at Winterbourne 
irom head to foot; he now bowed gravely 
to the young lady. “ I have the honor to 
inform mademoiselle that luncheon is 
upon the table.” 

Miss Miller slowly rose. “ See here, 
Eugenio !” she said ; “ I’m going to that 
old castle, anyway.” 



“ To the Chateau de Cliillon, madem- 
oiselle?” the courier inquired. “Madem- 
oiselle has made arrangements?” he add- 
ed, in a tone which struck Winterbourne 
as very impertinent. 

Eugenio’s tone apparently threw, even 
to Miss Miller’s own apprehension, a 
slightly ironical light upon the young 
girl’s situation. She turned to Winter- 
bourne, blushing a little — a very little. 
“ You won’t back out?” she said. 

“ I shall not be happy till we go!” he 
protested. 

“And you are staying in this hotel ?” 
she went on. “And you are really an 
American ?” 

The courier stood looking at Winter- 
bourne offensively. The young man, 
at least, thought his manner of look- 
ing an offence to Miss Miller ; it 
conveyed an imputation 


up” ac- 
quaintances. “ I shall 
have the honor of presenting to you 
a person who will tell you all about 
me,” he said, smiling, and 
referring to his aunt. 


“ Ob, well, we’ll go some day,” said 
Miss Miller. And she gave him a smile 
and turned away. She put up her parasol 
and walked back to the inn beside Euge- 
nio. Winterbourne stood looking after 
her ; and as she moved away, drawing 
her muslin furbelows over the gravel, 
said to himself that she had the tournure 
of a princess. 

He had, however, engaged to do more 
than proved feasible, in promising to pre- 
sent his aunt, Mrs. Costello, to Miss Daisy 
Miller. As soon as the former lady had got 
better of her headache he waited upon 
her in her apartment; and, after the prop- 
er inquiries in regard to her health, he 
asked her if she had observed in the hotel 
an American family — a mamma, a daugh- 
ter, and a little boy. 

“ And a courier ?” said Mrs. Costello. 
“ Oh yes, I have observed them. Seen 
them — heard them — and kept out of their 
way.” Mrs. Costello was a widow with 
a fortune ; a person of much distinction, 
who frequently intimated that, if she were 
not so dreadfully liable to sick-headaches, 
she would probably have left a deeper 
impress upon her time. She had a long, 
pale face, a high nose, and a great deal of 


very striking white hair, which she wore 
in large puffs and rouleaux over the top 
of her head. She had two sons married 
in New York, and another who was now 
in Europe. This young man was amusing 
himself at Hombourg ; and, though he was 
on his travels, was rarely perceived to visit 
any particular city at the moment selected 
by his mother for her own appearance 
there. Her nephew, who had come up to 
Yevay expressly to see her, was therefore 
more attentive than those who, as she said, 
were nearer to her. He had imbibed at 
Geneva the idea that one must always be 
attentive to one’s aunt. Mrs. Costello had 
not seen him for many years, and she was 
greatly pleased with him, manifesting her 
approbation by initiating him into many 
of the secrets of that social sway which, as 
she gave him to understand, she exerted in 
the American capital. She admitted that 
she was very exclusive ; but, if he were 
acquainted with New York, he would see 
that one had to be. And her picture of 
the minutely hierarchical constitution of 
the society of that city, which she pre- 
sented to him in many different lights, 
was, to Winterbourne’s imagination, al- 
most oppressively striking. 

30 


He immediately perceived, from her 
tone, that Miss Daisy Miller’s place in 
the social scale was low. “ I am afraid 
you don’t approve of them,” he said. 

“ They are very common,” Mrs. Cos- 
tello declared. “ They are the sort of 
Americans that one does one’s duty by 
not — not accepting.” 

“Ah, you don’t accept them?” said 
the young man. 

“I can’t, my dear Frederick. I would 
if I could, but I can’t.” 

“The young girl is very pretty,” said 
Winterbourne, in a moment. 

“ Of course she’s pretty. But she 
is very common.” 

“ I see what you mean, of course,” 
said Winterbourne, after another pause. 

“ She has that charming look that 
they all have,” his aunt resumed. 

“I can’t think where they pick 
it up ; and she dresses in 
perfection — no, you don’t 
know how well she 
dresses. I can’t 
think where 
they get their 
taste.” 

“But, my 



dear aunt, she is not, after all, a Co- 
manche savage.” 

“ She is a young lady,” said Mrs. Cos- 
tello, “who has an intimacy with her 
mamma’s courier.” 

“An intimacy with the courier?” the 
young man demanded. 

“ Oh, the mother is just as bad ! They 
treat the courier like a familiar friend 
— like a gentleman. I shouldn’t wonder 
if he dines with them. Very likely they 
have never seen a man with such good 
manners, such fine clothes, so like a gen- 
tleman. He probably corresponds to the 
young lady’s idea of a count. He sits 
with them in the garden in the evening. 
I think he smokes.” 

Winterbourne listened with interest to 
these disclosures; they helped him to 
make up his mind about Miss Daisy. 
Evidently she was rather wild. 

“Well,” he said, “I am not a cou- 
rier, and yet she was very charming to 
me.” 

“ You had better have said at first,” 
said Mrs. Costello, with dignity, “ that 
you had made her acquaintance.” 

“We simply met in the garden, and we 
talked a bit.” 


“ Tout bonnement ! And pray what 
did you say ?” 

“ I said I should take the liberty of in- 
troducing her to my admirable aunt.” 

“ I am much obliged to you.” 

“ It was to guarantee my respectabil- 
ity,” said Winterbourne. 

“ And pray who is to guarantee hers?” 

u Ah, you are cruel,” said the young 
man. “ She’s a very nice young girl.” 

“ You don’t say that as if you believed 
it,” Mrs. Costello observed. 

“ She is completely uncultivated,” Win- 
terbourne went on. “But she is won- 
derfully pretty, and, in short, she is very 
nice. To prove that I believe it, I am 
going to take her to the Chateau de Chil- 
lon.” 

“You two are going off there togeth- 
er? I should say it proved just the con- 
trary. How long had you known her, 
may I ask, when this interesting project 
was formed ? You haven’t been twentv- 
four hours in the house.” 

“I had known her half an hour!” said 
Winterbourne, smiling. 

“Dear me!” cried Mrs. Costello. 
“ What a dreadful girl !” 

Her nephew was silent for some mo- 
33 


merits. “ Yon really think, then,” he ba 
gan, earnestly, and with a desire for trust- 
worthy information — “you really think 
that — ” But he paused again. 

“ Think what, sir ?” said his aunt. 

“ That she is the sort of young lady 
who expects a man, sooner or later, to 
carry her off ?” 

“I haven’t the least idea what such 
young ladies expect a man to do. But I 
really think that you had better not med- 
dle with little American girls that are 
uncultivated, as you call them. You 
have lived too long out of the country. 
You will be sure to make some great mis- 
take. You are too innocent.” 

“ My dear aunt, I am not so innocent,” 
said Winterbourne, smiling and curling 
his mustache. 

“ You are too guilty, then !” 

Winterbourne continued to curl his 
mustache, meditatively. “ You won’t let 
the poor girl know you, then?” he asked 
at last. 

“ Is it literally true that she is going to 
the Chateau de Chillon with you ?” 

“ I think that she fully intends it.” 

“Then, my dear Frederick,” said Mrs. 
Costello, “ I must decline the honor of 

34 


her acquaintance. I am an old woman, 
but I am not too old, thank Heaven, to 
be shocked !” 

“ But don’t they all do these things — 
the young girls in America?” Winter- 
bourne inquired. 

Mrs. Costello stared a moment. “ I 
should like to see my granddaughters do 
them !” she declared, grimly. 

This seemed to throw some light upon 
the matter, for Winterbourne remember- 
ed to have heard that his pretty cousins 
in New York were “ tremendous flirts.” 
If, therefore. Miss Daisy Miller exceeded 
the liberal margin allowed to these young 
ladies, it was probable that anything might 
be expected of her. Winterbourne was 
impatient to see her again, and he was 
vexed with himself that, by instinct, he 
should not appreciate her justly. 

Though he was impatient to see her, 
he hardly knew what he should say to 
her about his aunt’s refusal to become ac- 
quainted with her; but he discovered, 
promptly enough, that with Miss Daisy 
Miller there was no great need of walk- 
ing on tiptoe. He found her that even- 
ing in the garden, wandering about in the 
warm starlight like an indolent sylph, 






and swinging to and fro the largest fan 
he had ever beheld. It was ten o’clock. 
He had dined with his aunt, had been 
sitting with her since dinner, and had 
just taken leave of her till the morrow. 
Miss Daisy Miller seemed very glad to 
see him; she declared it was the longest 
evening she had ever passed. 

“ Have you been all alone ?” he asked. 

“ I have been walking round with 
mother. But mother gets tired walking 
round,” she answered. 

“ Has she gone to bed ?” 

“ No; she doesn’t like to go to bed,” 
said the young girl. “ She doesn’t sleep 
— not three hours. She says she doesn’t 
know how she lives. She’s dreadful- 
ly nervous. I guess she sleeps more 
than she thinks. She’s gone some- 
where after Randolph ; she wants to 
try to get him to go to bed. He doesn’t 
like to go to bed.” 

“ Let us hope she will persuade him,” 
observed Winterbourne. 

“ She will talk to him all she can ; but 


he doesn’t like her to talk to him,” said 
Miss Daisy, opening her fan. “ She’s 
going to try to get Eugenio to talk to 
him. But he isn’t afraid of Eugenio. 
Eugenio’s a splendid courier, but he can’t 
make much impression on Randolph ! I 
don’t believe he’ll go to bed before elev- 
en.” It appeared that Randolph’s vigil 
was in fact triumphantly prolonged, for 
Winterbourne strolled about with the 
young girl for some time without meet- 
ing her mother. “ I have been look- 
ing round for that lady you want to 
introduce me to,” his companion re- 
sumed. “ She’s your aunt.” Then, on 
Winterbourne’s admitting the fact, and 
expressing some curiosity as to how she 
had learned it, she said she had heard all 
about Mrs. Costello from the chamber- 
maid. She was very quiet, and very 
comme il faut ; she wore white puffs; 
she spoke to no one, and she never dined 
at the table d’hote. Every two days she 
had a headache. “ I think that’s a lovely 
description, headache and all !” said Miss 
Daisy, chattering along in her thin, gay 
voice. “ I want to know her ever so 
much. I know just what your aunt 
would be ; I know I should like her. She 


would be very exclusive. I like a lady 
to be exclusive ; I’m dying to be ex- 
clusive myself. Well, we are exclusive, 
mother and I. We don’t speak to every 
one — or they don’t speak to us. I sup- 
pose it’s about the same thing. Anyway, 
I shall be ever so glad to know your 
aunt.” 

Winterbourne was embarrassed. “ She 
would be most happy,” he said ; “ but I 
am afraid those headaches will interfere.” 

The young girl looked at him through 
the dusk. “But I suppose she doesn’t 
have a headache every day,” she said, 
sympathetically. 

Winterbourne was silent a moment. 
“ She tells me she does,” he answered at 
last, not knowing what to say. 

Miss Daisy Miller stopped, and stood 
looking at him. Her prettiness was still 
visible in the darkness; she was opening 
and closing her enormous fan. “ She 
doesn’t want to know me !” she said, 
suddenly. “ Why don’t you say so ? You 
needn’t be afraid. I’m not afraid !” And 
she gave a little laugh. 

Winterbourne fancied there was a tre- 
mor in her voice ; he was touched, shock- 
ed, mortified by it. “ My dear young 


lady,” he protested, “ she knows no one. 
It’s her wretched health.” 

The young girl walked on a few steps, 
laughing still. “ You needn’t be afraid,” 
she repeated. “ Why should she want to 
know me ?” Then she paused again ; 
she was close to the parapet of the gar- 
den, and in front of her was the starlit 
lake. There was a vague sheen upon its 
surface, and in the distance were dimly- 
seen mountain forms. Daisy Miller look- 
ed out upon the mysterious prospect, and 
then she gave another little laugh. “ Gra- 
cious ! she is exclusive !” she said. Win- 
terbourne wondered whether she was 
seriously wounded, and for a moment al- 
most wished that her sense of injury 
might be such as to make it becoming in 
him to attempt to reassure and comfort 
her. He had a pleasant sense that she 
would be very approachable for con- 
solatory purposes. He felt then, for the 
instant, quite ready to sacrifice his aunt, 
conversationally ; to admit that she was a 
proud, rude woman, and to declare that 
they needn’t mind her. But before he 
had time to commit himself to this peril- 
ous mixture of gallantry and impiety, the 
young lady, resuming her walk, gave 


an exclamation in quite another tone. 
“Well, here’s mother ! I guess she hasn’t 
got Randolph to go to bed.” The figure 
of a lady appeared, at a distance, very in- 
distinct in the darkness, and advancing 
with a slow and wavering movement. 
Suddenly it seemed to pause. 

“Are you sure it is your mother? Can 
you distinguish her in this thick dusk?” 
Winterbourne asked. 

“ Well!” cried Miss Daisy Miller, with 
a laugh ; “ I guess I know my own 
mother. And when she has got on my 
shawl, too ! She is always wearing my 
things.” 

The lady in question, ceasing to ad- 
vance, hovered vaguely about the spot at 
which she had checked her steps. 

“ I am afraid your mother doesn’t see 
you,” said Winterbourne. “ Or perhaps,” 
he added, thinking, with Miss Miller, the 
joke permissible — “ perhaps she feels 
guilty about your shawl.” 

“ Oh, it’s a fearful old thing !” the 
young girl replied, serenely. “ I told her 
she could wear it. She won’t come here, 
because she sees you.” 

“ Ah, then,” said Winterbourne, “ 1 
had better leave you.” 

40 



“Oh no; come on!” urged Miss 
Daisy Miller. 

“ I’m afraid your mother doesn’t 
approve of my walking with yon.” 

Miss Miller gave him a serious 
X glance. “ It isn’t for me ; it’s 
0 for you — that is, it’s for her. 
Well, I don’t know who 
for ! But mother doesn’t 
like any of my gentlemen 
friends. She’s right down 
timid. She always makes 
a fuss if I introduce a gen- 
tleman. But I do introduce 
them — almost always. If 
I didn’t introduce my 
gentlemen friends to mother,” the 
young girl added, in her little 
soft, flat monotone, “ I shouldn’t 
think it was natural.” 

“To introduce me,” said Win- 
terbourne, “you must know my 




name.” And he proceeded to pronounce 
it to her. 

“ Oh dear, I can’t say all that !” said 
his companion, with a laugh. But by 
this time they had come up to Mrs. Mil- 
ler, who, as they drew near, walked to 
the parapet of the garden and leaned 
upon it, looking intently at the lake, and 
turning her back to them. “ Mother 1” 
said the young girl, in a tone of decision. 
Upon this the elder lady turned round. 
“ Mr. Winterbourne,” said Miss Daisy 
Miller, introducing the young man very 
frankly and prettily. “ Common,” she 
was, as Mrs. Costello had pronounced her; 
yet it was a wonder to Winterbourne 
that, with her commonness, she had a sin- 
gularly delicate grace. 

Her mother was a small, spare, light 
person, with a wandering eye, a very 
exiguous nose, and a large forehead, dec- 
orated with a certain amount of thin, 
much-frizzled hair. Like her daughter, 
Mrs. Miller was dressed with extreme 
elegance ; she had enormous diamonds in 
her ears. So far as Winterbourne could 
observe, she gave him no greeting — she 
certainly was not looking at him. Daisy 
was near her, pulling her shawl straight. 

42 


“What are you doing, poking round 
here ?” this young lady inquired, but by 
no means with that harshness of accent 
which her choice of words may imply. 

“ I don’t know,” said her mother, turn- 
ing towards the lake again. 

“ I shouldn’t think you’d want that 
shawl !” Daisy exclaimed. 

“Well, I do!” her mother answered, 
with a little laugh. 

“ Did you get Randolph to go to bed ?” 
asked the young girl. 

“ No ; I couldn’t induce him,” said 
Mrs. Miller, very gently. “ He wants to 
talk to the waiter. He likes to talk to 
that waiter.” 

“ I was telling Mr. Winterbourne,” the 
young girl went on ; and to the young 
man’s ear her tone might have indicated 
that she had been uttering his name all 
her life. 

“Oh yes!” said Winterbourne; “I 
have the pleasure of knowing your son.” 

Randolph’s mamma was silent ; she 
turned her attention to the lake. But at 
last she spoke. “Well, I don’t see how 
he lives !” 

“ Anyhow, it isn’t so bad as it was at 
Dover,” said Daisy Miller. 


“And what occurred at Dover?” Win 
terbourne asked. 

“ He wouldn’t go to bed at all. I guess 
he sat up all night in the public parlor. 
He wasn’t in bed at twelve o’clock ; i 
know that.” 

“ It was half-past twelve,” declareo 
Mrs. Miller, with mild emphasis. 

“Does he sleep much during the day?” 
Winterbourne demanded. 

“ I guess he doesn’t sleep much,” Daisy 
rejoined. 

“ I wish he would !” said her mother. 
“ It seems as if he couldn’t.” 

“ I think he’s real tiresome,” Daisy 
pursued. 

Then for some moments there was 
silence. “Well, Daisy Miller,” said the 
elder lady, presently, “I shouldn’t think 
you’d want to talk against your own 
brother !” 

“Well, he is tiresome, mother,” said 
Daisy, quite without the asperity of a 
retort. 

“ He’s only nine,” urged Mrs. Miller. 

“ Well, he wouldn’t go to that castle,” 
said the young girl. “ I’m going there 
with Mr. Winterbourne.” 

To this announcement, very placidly 

44 




offered no response. Winter- 
bourne took for granted that she 
deeply disapproved of the pro- 
jected excursion; hut he said to 
himself that she was a simple, 
easily- managed person, and that a 
few deferential protestations would 
take the edge from her displeasure. • 


Mrs. Miller’s 
wandering eyes 
attached them- 


“ Yes,” he began ; “your daughter 
has kindly allowed me the honor of 
being her guide.” 




selves, with a sort of appealing air, to 
Daisy, who, however, strolled a few steps 
farther, gently humming to herself. “ 1 
presume you will go in the cars,” said her 
mother. 

“ Yes, or in the boat,” said Winter- 
bourne. 

“Well, of course, I don’t know,” Mrs. 
Miller rejoined. “ I have never been to 
that castle.” 

“ It is a pity you shouldn’t go,” said 
Winterbourne, beginning to feel reassur- 
ed as to her opposition. And yet he was 
quite prepared to find that, as a matter 
of course, she meant to accompany her 
daughter. 

“We’ve been thinking ever so much 
about going,” she pursued ; “ but it seems 
as if we couldn’t. Of course Daisy, she 
wants to go round. But there’s a lady 
here — I don’t know her name — she says 
she shouldn’t think we’d want to go to 
see castles here ; she should think we’d 
want to wait till w T e got to Italy. It 
seems as if there would be so many there,” 
continued Mrs. Miller, with an air of in- 
creasing confidence. “ Of course we only 
want to see the principal ones. We visited 
several in England,” she presently added. 


“ All, yes ! in England there are beau- 
tiful castles,” said Winterbourne. “ But 
Cliillon, here, is very well worth seeing.” 

“ Well, if Daisy feels up to it — ” said 
Mrs. Miller, in a tone impregnated with 
a sense of the magnitude of the enter- 
prise. “ It seems as if there was nothing 
she wouldn’t undertake.” 

“ Oh, I think she’ll enjoy it !” Winter- 
bourne declared. And he desired more 
and more to make it a certainty that he 
was to have the privilege of a tete-a-tete 
with the young lady, who was still stroll- 
ing along in front of them, softly vocaliz- 
ing. “You are not disposed, madam,” he 
inquired, “ to undertake it yourself ?” 

Daisy’s mother looked at him an instant 
askance, and then walked forward in si- 
lence. Then — “ I guess she had better go 
alone,” she said, simply. Winterbourne 
observed to himself that this was a very 
different type of maternity from that of 
the vigilant matrons who massed them- 
selves in the fore -front of social inter- 
course in the dark old city at the other 
end of the lake. But his meditations 
were interrupted by hearing his name 
very distinctly pronounced by Mrs. Mil- 
ler’s unprotected daughter. 

47 


“Mr. W interbourne!” murmured Daisy. 
“ Mademoiselle !” said tlie young man. 
“ Don’t you want to take me out in a 
boat ?” 



“ At present !” he asked. 

“ Of course !” said Daisy. 

“Well, Annie Miller!” exclaimed her 
mother. 

“ I beg you, madam, to let her go,” 
said Winterbourne, ardently; for he had 
never yet enjoyed the sensation of guid- 
ing through the summer starlight a 
skiff freighted with a fresh and 
beautiful young girl. 

“ I shouldn’t 
think she’d 
want to,” 
said her 
mother. “ I 
should think 
she’d rath- 


er go in- 
doors.” 



“ I’m sure Mr. Winterbourne wants to 
take me,” Daisy declared. “ He’s so aw- 
fully devoted !” 

a I will row you over to Cliillon in the 
starlight.” 

“ I don’t believe it !” said Daisy. 

“ Well!” ejaculated the elder lady again. 

“ You haven’t spoken to me for half an 
hour,” her daughter went on. 

“ I have been having some very pleas- 
ant conversation with your mother,” said 
Winterbourne. 

“Well, I want you to take me out in 
a boat !” Daisy repeated. They had all 
stopped, and she had turned round and 
was looking at Winterbourne. Her face 
wore a charming smile, her pretty eyes 
were gleaming, she was swinging her 
great fan about. Ho ; it’s impossible to 
be prettier than that, thought Winter- 
bourne. 

“ There are half a dozen boats moored 
at that landing-place,” he said, pointing to 
certain steps which descended from the 
garden to the lake. “ If you will do me 
the honor to accept my arm, we will go 
and select one of them.” 

Daisy stood there smiling; she threw 
back her head and gave a little light 

49 


laugh. “I like a gentleman to be formal!” 
she declared. 

“ I assure you it’s a formal offer.” 

“ I was bound I would make you say 
something,” Daisy went on. 

“You see, it’s not very difficult,” said 
Winterbourne. “But I am afraid you 
are chaffing me.” 

“ I think not, sir,” remarked Mrs. Mil- 
ler, very gently. 

“ Do, then, let me give you a row,” he 
said to the young girl. 

“ It’s quite lovely, the w T ay you say 
that !” cried Daisy. 

“It will be still more lovely to do it.” 

“ Yes, it would be lovely !” said Daisy. 
But she made no movement to accom- 
pany him ; she only stood there laugh- 
ing. 

“ I should think you had better find out 
what time it is,” interposed her mother. 

“ It is eleven o’clock, madam,” said a 
voice, with a foreign accent, out of the 
neighboring darkness ; and W interbourne, 
turning, perceived the florid personage 
who was in attendance upon the two la- 
dies. He had apparently just approached. 

“ Oh, Eugenio,” said Daisy, “ I am go- 
ing out in a boat !” 



Eugenio bowed. “ At eleven o’clock, 
mademoiselle ?” 

“ I am going with Mr. Winterbourne — 
this very minute.” 

“ Do tell her she can’t,” said Mrs. Mil- 
ler to the courier. 

“ I think you had better not go out in 
a boat, mademoiselle,” Eugenio declared. 

Winterbourne wished to Heaven this 
pretty girl were not so familiar with her 
courier ; but he said nothing. 

“ I suppose you don’t think it’s proper !” 
Daisy exclaimed. “ Eugenio doesn’t think 
anything’s proper.” 

“I am at your service,” said Winter- 
bourne. 

“ Does mademoiselle propose to go 
alone?” asked Eugenio of Mrs. Miller. 

“ Oh, no ; with this gentleman !” an- 
swered Daisy’s mamma. 

The courier looked for a moment at 
Winterbourne — the latter thought he was 
smiling — and then, solemnly, with a bow, 
“As mademoiselle pleases !” he said. 

“ Oh, I hoped you would make a fuss !” 
said Daisy. “ I don’t care to go now.” 

“ I myself shall make a fuss if you don’t 
go,” said Winter- 

“ That’s all I 


fuss !” And the young girl began to laugh 
again. 

“ Mr. Randolph has gone to bed !” the 
courier announced, frigidly. 

“ Oh, Daisy ; now we can go !” said 
Mrs. Miller. 

Daisy turned away from Winterbourne, 
looking at him, smiling, and fanning her- 
self. “ Good-night,” she said ; “ I hope 
you are disappointed, or disgusted, or 
something !” 

He looked at her, taking the hand she 
offered him. “I am puzzled,” he an- 
swered. 

“Well, I hope it won’t keep you 
awake!” she said, very smartly; and, 
under the escort of the privileged Eu- 
genio, the two ladies passed towards the 
house. 

Winterbourne stood looking after them ; 
he was indeed puzzled. He lingered be- 
side the lake for a quarter of an hour, 
turning over the mystery of the young 
girl’s sudden familiarities and caprices. 
But the only very definite conclusion he 
came to was that he should enjoy deuced- 
ly “ going off ” with her somewhere. 

Two days afterwards he went off with 
her to the Castle of Chillon. He waited 
62 


for her in the large hall of the hotel, 
where the couriers, the servants, the for- 
eign tourists, were lounging about and 
staring. It was not the place he should 
have chosen, but she had appointed it. 
She came tripping down-stairs, buttoning 
her long gloves, squeezing her folded 
parasol against her pretty figure, dressed 
in the perfection of a soberly elegant trav- 
elling costume. Winterbourne was a man 
of imagination and, as our ancestors used 
to say, sensibility ; as he looked at her 
dress and — on the great staircase — her 
little rapid, confiding step, he felt as if 
there were something romantic going for- 
ward. He could have believed he was 
going to elope with her. He passed out 
with her among all the idle people that 
were assembled there ; they were all look- 
ing at her very hard ; she had begun to 
chatter as soon as she joined him. 
Winterbourne’s pr~* — 


ence had been that 
should be convey< 
Chillon in a carr 
but she expressed 
lively wish to go in 
the little steam- 
er; she de- 




dared that she had a passion for steam- 
boats. There was always such a lovely 
breeze upon the water, and you saw such 
lots of people. The sail was not long, but 
Winterbourne’s companion found time to 
say a great many things. To the young 
man himself their little excursion was so 
much of an escapade — an adventure — 
that, even allowing for her habitual sense 
of freedom, he had some expectation of 
seeing her regard it in the same way. 
But it must be confessed that, in this par- 
ticular, he was disappointed. Daisy 
Miller was extremely animated, she 
was in charming spirits ; but she 
was apparently not at all excited ; 
she was not fluttered ; she avoided 
neither his eyes nor those of any 
one else ; she blushed neither when 
she looked at him nor when she felt 
that people were looking at her. 
People continued to look at her a 
great deal, and Winterbourne took 
much satisfaction in his pretty com- 
panion’s distinguished air. He had 
been a little afraid that she would 
talk loud, laugh overmuch, and 
even, perhaps, desire to move about 
the boat a good deal. But he quite 



forgot his fears ; he sat smiling, with his 
eyes upon her face, while, without mov- 
ing from her place, she delivered herself 
of a great number of original reflections. 
It was the most charming garrulity he 
had ever heard. He had assented to the 
idea that she was “ common but was 
she so, after all, or was he simply getting 
used to her commonness? Her conver- 
sation was chiefly of what metaphysicians 
term the objective cast ; but every now 
and then it took a subjective turn. 

“ What on earth are you so grave 
about?” she suddenly demanded, fixing 
her agreeable eyes upon Winterbourne’s. 

“ Am I grave?” he asked. “ I had an 
idea I was grinning from ear to ear.” 

“ You look as if you were taking me 
to a funeral. If that’s a grin, your ears 
are very near together.” 

“ Should you like me to dance a horn- 
pipe on the deck?” 

“Pray do, and I’ll carry round your 
hat. It will pay the expenses of our 
journey.” 

“ I never was better pleased in my 
life,” murmured Winterbourne. 

She looked at him a moment, and then 
burst into a little laugh. “ I like to make 

55 


you say those things ! You’re a queer 
mixture !” 

In the castle, after they had landed, the 
subjective element decidedly prevailed. 
Daisy tripped about the vaulted cham- 
bers, rustled her skirts in the corkscrew 
staircases, flirted back with a pretty little 
cry and a shudder from the edge of the 
oubliettes , and turned a singularly well- 
shaped ear to everything that Winter- 
bourne told her about the place. But he 
saw that she cared very little for feudal 
antiquities, and that the dusky traditions 
of Chillon made but a slight impression 
upon her. They had the good-fortune to 
have been able to walk about without 
other companionship than that of the 
custodian; and Winterbourne arranged 
with this functionary that they should 
not be hurried — that they should linger 
and pause wherever they chose. The 
custodian interpreted the bargain gener- 
ously — Winterbourne, on his side, had 
been generous — and ended by leaving 
them quite to themselves. Miss Miller’s 
observations were not remarkable for log- 
ical consistency; for anything she wanted 
to say she was sure to find a pretext. 
She found a great many pretexts in the 

56 



rugged embrasures of Chillon for asking 
W interbourne sudden questions about him- 
self — his family, his previous history, his 



tastes, his habits, his intentions— and for 
supplying information upon correspond- 
ing points in her own personality. Of 
her own tastes, habits, and intentions Miss 
Miller was prepared to give the most def- 
inite, and, indeed, the most favorable ac- 
count. 

“ Well, I hope you know enough !” she 
said to her companion, after he had told 
her the history of the unhappy Bonnivard. 
“I never saw a man that knew so much!” 
The history of Bonnivard had evidently, 
as they say, gone into one ear and out 
of the other. But Daisy went on to 
say that she wished Winterbourne 
would travel with them, and “ go 
round ” with them ; they might know I 
something, in that case. “ Don’t you 
want to come and teach Randolph ?” 
she asked. Winterbourne said that 
nothing could possibly 
j please him so much, but 
that he had unfortunately 
other occupations. “ Other 
occupations? I don’t be- 
lieve it !” said Miss Daisy. 


“What do you mean? You are not in 
business.” The young man admitted that 
he was not in business; but he had en- 
gagements which, even within a day or 
two, would force him to go back to Gene- 
va. “Oh, bother!” she said; “I don’t 
believe it !” and she began to talk about 
something else. But a few moments later, 
when he was pointing out to her the pretty 
design of an antique fireplace, she broke 
out irrelevantly, “ You don’t mean to say 
you are going back to Geneva ?” 

“ It is a melancholy fact that I shall 
have to return to-morrow.” 

“Well, Mr. Winterbourne,” said Daisy, 
“ I think you’re horrid !” 

“ Oh, don’t say such dreadful things !” 
said Winterbourne — “just at the last !” 

“ The last !” cried the young girl ; “ I 
call it the first. I have half a mind to 
leave you here and go straight back to the 
hotel alone.” And for the next ten min- 
utes she did nothing but call him horrid. 
Poor Winterbourne was fairly bewildered ; 
no young lady had as yet done him the 
honor to be so agitated by the announce- 
ment of his movements. His companion, 
after this, ceased to pay any attention to 
the curiosities of Chi lion or the beauties 

58 



va, whom she appeared 
to have instantly taken it for granted 
that he was hurrying back to see. How 
did Miss Daisy Miller know that there 
■was a charmer in Geneva. ? Winter- 
bourne, who denied the existence of such 
a person, was quite unable to discover ; 
and he was divided between amazement 
at the rapidity of her induction and 
amusement at the frankness of her per- 
siflage. She seemed to him, in all this, 
an extraordinary mixture of innocence 
and crudity. ‘‘Does she never allow you 

59 


more than three days at a time?” asked 
Daisy, ironically. “ Doesn’t she give you 
a vacation in summer? There is no one 
so hard worked but they can get leave 
to go off somewhere at this season. I 
suppose, if you stay another day, she’ll 
come after you in the boat. Do wait over 
till Friday, and I will go down to the 
landing to see her arrive!” Winter- 
bourne began to think he had been wrong 
to feel disappointed in the temper in 
which the young lady had embarked. If 
he had missed the personal accent, the 
personal accent was now making its ap- 
pearance. It sounded very distinctly, at 
last, in her telling him she would stop 
“ teasing ” him if he would promise her 
solemnly to come down to Rome in the 
winter. 

“That’s not a difficult promise to make,” 
said Winterbourne. “My aunt has taken 
an apartment in Rome for the winter, 
and has already asked me to come and see 
her.” 

“ I don’t want you to come for your 
aunt,” said Daisy ; “ I want you to come 
for me.” And this was the only allusion 
that the young man was ever to hear her 
make to his invidious kinswoman. He 


declared that, at any rate, he would cer- 
tainly come. After this Daisy stopped 
teasing. Winterbourne took a carriage, 
and they drove back to Yevay in the 
dusk. The young girl was very quiet. 

In the evening Winterbourne mention- 
ed to Mrs. Costello that he had spent the 
afternoon at Chillon with Miss Daisy 
Miller. 

“ The Americans — of the courier ?” 
asked this lady. 

“ Ah, happily,” said Winterbourne, “the 
courier stayed at home.” 

“ She went with you all alone ?” 

“ All alone.” 

Mrs. Costello sniffed a little at her smell- 
ing-bottle. “And that,” she exclaimed, 
“ is the young person whom you wanted 
me to know !” 





























If 















































s 








r 


.* 













































































» 























interbourne, who had returned to Ge- 
neva the day after his excursion to Cliil- 
lon, went to Rome towards the end of 
January. His aunt had been established 
there for several weeks, and he had re- 
ceived a couple of letters from her. 
‘‘Those people you were so devoted to 
last summer at Yevay have turned up 
here, courier and all,” she wrote. “ They 
seem to have made several acquaintances, 
but the courier continues to be the most 
intime. The young lady, however, is also 
very intimate with some third-rate Ital- 
ians, with whom she rackets about in a 


63 


way that makes much talk. Bring me 
that pretty novel of Cherbuliez’s — Paule 
Mere — and don’t come later than the 
23d.” 

In the natural course of events, Win- 
terbourne, on arriving in Rome, would 
presently have ascertained Mrs. Miller’s 
address at the American banker’s, and 
have gone to pay his compliments to 
Miss Daisy.- “ After what happened at 
Vevay, I think I may certainly call upon 
them,” he said to Mrs. Costello. 

“If, after what happens — at Vevay 
and everywhere — you desire to keep up 
the acquaintance, you are very welcome. 
Of course a man may know every one. 
Men are welcome to the privilege !” 

“ Pray what is it that happens — here, 
for instance?” Winterbourne demanded. 

“The girl goes about alone with her 
foreigners. As to what happens further, 
you must apply elsewhere for informa- 
tion. She has picked up half a dozen of 
the regular Roman fortune-hunters, and 
she takes them about to people’s houses. 
When she comes to a party she brings 
with her a gentleman with a good deal 
of manner and a wonderful mustache.” 

“And where is the mother ?” 


64 


“I haven’t the least idea. They are 
very dreadful people.” 

Winterbourne meditated a moment. 
“They are very ignorant — very innocent 
only. Depend upon it they are not bad.” 

“They are hopelessly vulgar,” said 
Mrs. Costello. “ Whether or no being 
hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad ’ is a ques- 
tion for the metaphysicians. They are 
bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and 
for this short life that is quite enough.” 

The news that Daisy Miller was sur- 
rounded by half a dozen wonderful mus- 
taches checked Winterbourne’s impulse 
to go straightway to see her. He had, 
perhaps, not definitely flattered himself 
that he had made an ineffaceable impres- 
sion upon her heart, but he was annoyed 
at hearing of a state of affairs so little in 
harmony with an image that had lately 
flitted in and out of his own meditations; 
the image of a very pretty girl looking 
out of an old Roman window and asking 
herself urgently when Mr. Winterbourne 
would arrive. If, however, he determined 
to wait a little before reminding Miss 
Miller of his claims to her consideration, 
he went very soon to call upon two or 
three other friends. One of these friends 

65 


was an American lady who had spent 
several winters at Geneva, where she had 
placed her children at school. She was 
a very accomplished woman, and she 
lived in the Via Gregoriana. Winter- 
bourne found her in a little crimson 
drawing-room on a third floor ; the room 
was filled with southern sunshine. He 
had not been there ten minutes when the 
servant came in, announcing “ Madame 
Mila!” This announcement was present- 
ly followed by the entrance of little 
Randolph Miller, who stopped in the 
middle of the room and stood staring at 
Winterbourne. An instant later his pret- 
ty sister crossed the threshold ; and then, 
after a considerable interval, Mrs. Miller 
slowly advanced. 

“I know you !” said Randolph. 

“ I’m sure you know a great many 
things,” exclaimed Winterbourne, taking 
him by the hand. “ How is your educa- 
tion coming on ?” 

Daisy was exchanging greetings very 
prettily with her hostess ; but when she 
heard Winterbourne’s voice she quick- 
ly turned her head. “Well, I de- 
clare !” she said. 

“I told you I should come, you 


know,” Winterbourne rejoined, smil- 
ing. 

“Well, I didn’t believe it,” said Miss 
Daisy. 

“ I am much obliged to you,” laughed 
the young man. 

“You might have come to see me!” 
said Daisy. 

“ I arrived only yesterday.” 

“ I don’t believe that !” the young girl 
declared. 

Winterbourne turned with a protesting 
smile to her mother ; but this lady evaded 
his glance, and, seating herself, fixed her 
eyes upon her son. “We’ve got a bigger 
place than this,” said Randolph. “It’s 
all gold on the walls.” 

Mrs. Miller turned uneasily in her 
chair. “I told you if I were to bring 
you, you would say something !” she 
murmured. 

“I told you!” Randolph exclaimed. 
“ I tell you, sir !” he added, jocosely, giv- 
ing Winterbourne a thump on the knee. 
“It is bigger, too !” 

Daisy had entered upon a lively con- 
versation with her hostess, and Winter- 
bourne judged it becoming to address a 
few words to her mother. “ I hope you 

67 



have been well since we parted at Ve- 
vay,” he said. 

Mrs. Miller now certainly looked at 
him — at his chin. “ Not very w T ell, sir,” 
she answered. 

“ She’s got the dyspepsia,” said Kan- 
dolpli. “ I’ve got it, too. Father’s got 
it. I’ve got it most !” 

This announcement, instead of embar- 
rassing Mrs. Miller, seemed to relieve 
her. “ I suffer from the liver,” she said. 
“I think it’s this climate; it’s less bracing 
than Schenectady, especially in the win- 
ter season. I don’t know whether you 
know we reside at Schenectady. I was 
saying to Daisy that I certainly hadn’t 
found any one like Dr. Davis, and I didn’t 
believe I should. Oh, at Schenectady he 
stands first ; they think everything of 
him. He has so much to do, and yet 
there was nothing he wouldn’t do for me. 
He said he never saw anything like my 
dyspepsia, but he was bound to cure it. 
I’m sure there was nothing he wouldn’t 
try. He was just going to try something 
new when we came off. Mr. Miller want- 
ed Daisy to see Europe for herself. But 
I wrote to Mr. Miller that it seems as if 
I couldn’t get on without Dr. Davis. At 


* 


Schenectady he stands at the very top ; 
and there’s a great deal of sickness there, 
too. It affects my sleep.” 

Winterbourne had a good deal of path- 
ological gossip with Dr. Davis’s patient, 
during which Daisy chattered unremit- 
tingly to her own companion. The young 
man asked Mrs. Miller how she was 
pleased with Dome. “Well, I must say 
I am disappointed,” she answered. “ We 
had heard so much about it ; I suppose 
we had heard too much. But we couldn’t 
help that. We had been led to expect 
something different.” 

“Ah, wait a little, and you will be- 
come very fond of it,” said Winter- 
bourne. 

“ I hate it worse and worse every day !” 
cried Bandolph. 

“You are like the infant Hannibal,” 
said Winterbourne. 

“ Ho, I ain’t !” Bandolph declared, at 
a venture. 

“You are not much like an infant,” 
said his mother. “But we have seen 
places,” she resumed, “ that I should put 
a long way before Borne.” And in reply 
to Winterbourne’s interrogation, “There’s 
Zurich,” she concluded, “ I think Zurich 

69 


is lovely ; and we hadn’t heard half so 
much about it.” 

“The best place we’ve seen is the City 
of Richmond !” said Randolph. 

“He means the ship,” his mother ex- 
plained. “We crossed in that ship. 
Randolph had a good time on the City 
of Richmond .” 

“It’s the best place I’ve seen,” the 
child repeated. “ Only it was turned the 
wrong way.” 

“Well, we’ve got to turn the right way 
some time,” said Mrs. Miller, with a little 
laugh. Winterbourne expressed the hope 
that her daughter at least found some 
gratification in Rome, and she declared 
that Daisy was quite carried away. “ It’s 
on account of the society — the society’s 
splendid. She goes round everywhere ; 
she has made a great number of acquaint- 
ances. Of course she goes round more 
than I do. I must say they have been 
very sociable ; they have taken her right 
in. And then she knows a great many 
gentlemen. Oh, she thinks there’s noth- 
ing like Rome. Of course, it’s a great 
deal pleasanter for a young lady if she 
knows plenty of gentlemen.” 

By this time Daisy had turned her 

70 



attention again to Winterbourne. * “I’ve 
been telling Mrs. Walker how mean you 
were !” the young girl announced. 

“ And what is the evidence yon 
have offered ?” asked Winterbourne, 
rather annoyed at Miss Miller’s 
want of appreciation of the zeal of 
an admirer who on his way down 
to Rome had stopped neither at 
Bologna nor at Florence, simply 
because of a certain sentimental 
impatience. He remembered that 
a cynical compatriot had once told 
him that American women — the 
pretty ones, and this gave a large- 
ness to the axiom — were at once 
the most exacting in the world and 
the least endowed with a sense of 
indebtedness. 

“ Why, you were awfully mean at 
Vevay,”said Daisy. “You wouldn’t 
do anything. You wouldn’t stay 
there when I asked you.” 

“ My dearest young lady,” cried 
Winterbourne, with eloquence, 

“ have I come all the way to Rome 
to encounter your reproaches ?” 

“Just hear him say that!” said 
Daisy to her hostess, giving a twist 




to a bow on this lady’s dress. “ Did you 
ever hear anything so quaint ?” 

“ So quaint, my dear ?” murmured Mrs. 
Walker, in the tone of a partisan of Win- 
terbourne. 

“Well, I don’t know,” said Daisy, fin- 
gering Mrs. Walker’s ribbons. “Mrs. 
Walker, I want to tell you something.” 

“ Mother- r,” interposed Randolph, with 
his rough ends to his words, “ I tell you 
you’ve got to go. Eugenio ’ll raise — 
something !” 

“ I’m not afraid of Eugenio,” said Daisy, 
with a toss of her head. “ Look here, 
Mrs. Walker,” she went on, “you know 
I’m coming to your party.” 

“ I am delighted to hear it.” 

“ I’ve got a lovely dress !” 

“I am very sure of that.” 

“ But I want to ask a favor — permis- 
sion to bring a friend.” 

“ I shall be happy to see any of your 
friends,” said Mrs. Walker, turning with 
a smile to Mrs. Miller. 

“ Oil, they are not my friends,” an- 
swered Daisy’s mamma, smiling shyly, in 
her own fashion. “ I never spoke to 
them.” 

“ It’s an intimate friend of mine — Mr. 

72 


Giovanelli,” said Daisy, without a tremor 
in her clear little voice, or a shadow on 
her brilliant little face. 

Mrs. Walker was silent a moment; she 
gave a rapid glance at Winterbourne. “ I 
shall be glad to see Mr. Giovanelli,” she 
then said. 

“ He’s an Italian,” Daisy pursued, with 
the prettiest serenity. “ He’s a great 
friend of mine ; he’s the handsomest man 
in the world — except Mr. Winterbourne! 
He knows plenty of Italians, but he 
wants to know some Americans. He 
thinks ever so much of Americans. He’& 
tremendously clever. He’s perfectly 
lovely !” 

It was settled that this brilliant per- 
sonage should be brought to Mrs. Walk- 
er’s party, and then Mrs. Miller prepared 
to take her leave. “I guess we’ll go 
back to the hotel,” she said. 

“ You may go back to the hotel, moth- 
er, but I’m going to take a walk,” said 
Daisy. 

“ She’s going to walk with Mr. Giova- 
nelli,” Randolph proclaimed. 

“ I am going to the Pincio,” said Daisy, 
smiling. 

“ Alone, my dear — at this hour ?” Mrs. 

73 



Walker asked. The afternoon was draw- 
ing to a close — it was the hour for the 
throng of carriages and of contemplative 
pedestrians. “ I don’t think it’s safe, my 
dear,” said Mrs. Walker. 

“ Neither do I,” subjoined Mrs. Miller. 
“You’ll get the fever, as sure as you live. 
Remember what Dr. Davis told you !” 

“ Give her some medicine before she 
goes,” said Randolph. 

The company had risen to its feet ; 
Daisy, still showing her pretty teeth, bent 
over and kissed her hostess. “ Mrs. 
Walker, you are too perfect,” she said. 
“ I’m not going alone ; I am going to 
meet a friend.” 

“Your friend won’t keep you from 
getting the fever,” Mrs. Miller observed. 
“ Is it Mr. Giovanelli ?” asked the 
hostess. 

Winterbourne was watching the young 
girl ; at this question his attention 
quickened. She stood there smiling 
and smoothing her bonnet ribbons ; 
she glanced at Winterbourne. 
Then, while she glanced and 
smiled, she answered, without a 
shade of hesitation, “ Mr. Giova- 
nelli — the beautiful Giovanelli.” 


“ My dear young friend,” said Mrs. 
Walker, taking her hand, pleadingly, 
“ don’t walk off to the Pincio at this 
unhealthy hour to meet a beautiful Ital- 
ian.” 

“Well, he speaks English,” said Mrs. 
Miller. 

“ Gracious me !” Daisy exclaimed, “ I 
don’t want to do anything improper. 
There’s an easy way to settle it.” She 
continued to glance at Winterbourne. 
“The Pincio is only a hundred yards dis- 
tant; and if Mr. Winterbourne were as 
polite as he pretends, he would offer to 
walk with me !” 

Winterbourne’s politeness hastened to 
affirm itself, and the young girl gave him 
gracious leave to accompany her. They 
passed down -stairs before her mother, 
and at the door Winterbourne perceived 
Mrs. Miller’s carriage drawn up, with the 
ornamental courier, whose acquaintance 
he had made at Vevay, seated within, 
“ Good-bye, Eugenio !” cried Daisy ; “ I’m 
going to take a walk.” The distance 
from the Yia Gregoriana to the beautiful 
garden at the other end of the Pincian 
Hill is, in fact, rapidly traversed. As the 
day was splendid, however, and the con- 

75 



course of vehicles, walkers, and loungers 
numerous, the young Americans found 
their progress much delayed. This fact 
was highly agreeable to Winter- 
bourne, in spite of his conscious- 
ness of his singular situation. The 
slow-moving, idly-gazing Roman 
crowd bestowed much attention 
upon the extremely pretty young 
foreign lady who was passing 
V through it upon his arm ; and he 
wondered what on earth had been 
in Daisy’s mind when she pro- 
posed to expose herself, unattend- 
ed, to its appreciation. His own 
mission, to her sense, apparently, 
was to consign her to the hands 
of Mr. Giovanelli ; but Winter- 
bourne, at once annoyed and grat- 
ified, resolved that he would do 
no such thing. 

“ Why haven’t you been to see 
me?” asked Daisy. “You can’t 
get out of that.” 

“ I have had the honor of tell- 
ing you that I have only just 
stepped out of the train.” 


“You must have stayed in the train a 
good while after it stopped!” cried the 
young girl, with her little laugh. “ I 
suppose you were asleep. You have had 
time to go to see Mrs. Walker.” 

“I knew Mrs. Walker — ” Winter- 
bourne began to explain. 

“I know where you knew her. You 
knew her at Geneva. She told me so. 
Well, you knew me at Yevay. That’s 
just as good. So you ought to have 
come.” She asked him no other ques- 
tion than this ; she began to prattle about 
her own affairs. “We’ve got splendid 
rooms at the hotel ; Eugenio says they’re 
the best rooms in Rome. We are going 
to stay all winter, if we don’t die of the 
fever; and I guess we’ll stay then. It’s 
a great deal nicer than I thought ; I 
thought it would be fearfully quiet ; I 
was sure it would be awfully poky. I 
was sure we should be going round all 
the time with one of those dreadful old 
men that explain about the pictures and 
things. But w’e only had about a week 
of that, and now I’m enjoying myself. 
I know ever so many people, and they 
are all so charming. The society’s ex- 
tremely select. There are all kinds — 


English and Germans and Italians. I 
think I like the English best. I like 
their style of conversation. But there 
are some lovely Americans. I never saw 
anything so hospitable. There’s some- 
thing or other every day. There’s not 
much dancing; but I must say I never 
thought dancing was everything. I was 
always fond of conversation. I guess I 
shall have plenty at Mrs. Walker’s, her 
rooms are so small.” When they had 
passed the gate of the Pincian Gardens, 
Miss Miller began to wonder where Mr. 
Giovanelli might be. “We had better 
go straight to that place in front,” she 
said, “ where you look at the view.” 

“ I certainly shall not help you to find 
him,” Winterbourne declared. 

“ Then I shall find him without you,” 
said Miss Daisy. 

“You certainly won’t leave me !” cried 
Winterbourne. 

She burst into her little laugh. “ Are 
you afraid you’ll get lost — or run over? 
But there’s Giovanelli, leaning against that 
tree. He’s staring at the women in the car- 
riages ; did you ever see anything so cool ?” 

Winterbourne perceived at some dis- 
tance a little man standing with folded 

78 


arms nursing his cane. He had a hand- 
some face, an artfully poised hat, a glass 
in one eye, and a nosegay in his button- 
hole. Winterbourne looked at him a 
moment, and then said, “Do you mean 
to speak to that man ?” 

“ Do I mean to speak to him ? Why, 
you don’t suppose I mean to communi- 
cate by signs?” 

“ Pray understand, then,” said 
W interbourne, “ that I intend to 
remain with you.” 

Daisy stopped and looked at 
him, without a sign of troubled 
consciousness in her face ; with 
nothing but the presence of her 
charming eyes and her happy dim- 
ples. “Well, she’s a cool one!” 
thought the young man. 

“ I don’t like the way you say 
that,” said Daisy. “It’s too im- 
perious.” 

“ I beg your pardon if I say it 
wrong. The main point is to give 
you an idea of my meaning.” 

The young girl looked at him 
more gravely, but with eyes that 
were prettier than ever. “I have 
never allowed a gentleman to die- 





tate to me, or to interfere with anything 
Ido” 

“ I think you have made a mistake,” 
said Winterbourne. “ You should some- 
times listen to a gentleman — the right 
one.” 

Daisy began to laugh again. “ I do 
nothing but listen to gentlemen !” she ex- 
claimed. “ Tell me if Mr. Giovanelli is 
the right one.” 

The gentleman with the nosegay in 
his bosom had now perceived our two 
friends, and was approaching the young 
girl with obsequious rapidity. He bowed 
to Winterbourne as well as to the latter’s 
companion ; he had a brilliant smile, an 
intelligent eye; Winterbourne thought 
him not a bad -looking fellow. But he 
nevertheless said to Daisy, “Ho, he’s not 
the right one.” 

Daisy evidently had a natural talent 
for performing introductions ; she men- 
tioned the name of each of her compan- 
ions to the other. She strolled along 
with one of them on each side of her; 
Mr. Giovanelli, who spoke English very 
cleverly — Winterbourne afterwards learn- 
ed that he had practised the idiom upon 
a great many American heiresses — ad- 



dressed to her a great deal of very 
polite nonsense ; he was extreme- 
ly urbane, and the young Ameri- 
can, who said nothing, reflected 
upon that profundity of Italian 
cleverness which enables people 
to appear more gracious in pro- 
portion as they are more acute- 
ly disappointed. Giovanelli, of 
course, had counted upon some- 
thing more intimate ; he had not 
bargained for a party of three. 

But he kept his temper in a man- 
ner which suggested far-stretch- 
ing intentions. Winterbourne flattered 
himself that he had taken his measure. 
“ He is not a gentleman,” said the young 
American ; “ he is only a clever imita- 
tion of one. He is a music- master, or 
a penny-a-liner, or a third-rate artist. 
D — n his good looks !” Mr. Giovanelli 
had certainly a very pretty face ; but 
Winterbourne felt a superior indigna- 
tion at his own lovely fellow -country- 
woman’s not knowing the difference be- 
tween a spurious gentleman and a real 
one. Giovanelli chattered and jested, 
and made himself wonderfully agreeable. 
It was true that, if he was an imitation, 
81 


the imitation was brilliant. “Neverthe- 
less,” Winterbourne said to himself, “a 
nice girl ought to know !” And then 
he came back to the question whether 
this was, in fact, a nice girl. Would a 
nice girl, even allowing for her being a 
little American flirt, make a rendezvous 
with a presumably low-lived foreigner? 
The rendezvous in this case, indeed, had 
been in broad daylight, and in the most 
crow r ded corner of Rome ; but was it not 
impossible to regard the choice of these 
circumstances as a proof of extreme cyn- 
icism? Singular though it may seem, 
Winterbourne was vexed that the young 
girl, in joining her amoroso , should not 
appear more impatient of his own com- 
pany, and he was vexed because of his 
inclination. It was impossible to regard 
her as a perfectly well-conducted young 
lady ; she was wanting in a certain indis- 
pensable delicacy. It would therefore 
simplify matters greatly to be able to 
treat her as the object of one of those 
sentiments which are called by romancers 
“lawless passions.” That she should seem 
to wish to get rid of him would help him 
to think more lightly of her, and to be 
able to think more lightly of her w r ould 
82 


make her much less perplexing. But 
Daisy, on this occasion, continued to pre- 
sent herself as an inscrutable combination 
of audacity and innocence. 

She had been walking some quarter of 
an hour, attended by her two cavaliers, 
and responding in a tone of very childish 
gayety, as it seemed to Winterbourne, to 
the pretty speeches of Mr. Giovanelli, 
when a carriage that had detached itself 
from the revolving train drew up beside 
the path. At the same moment Winter- 
bourne perceived that his friend Mrs. 
Walker — the lady whose house he had 
lately left — was seated in the vehicle, and 
was beckoning to him. Leaving Miss 
Miller’s side, he hastened to obey her 
summons. Mrs. Walker was flushed ; she 
wore an excited air. “ It is really too 
dreadful,” she said. “That girl must 
not do this sort of thing. She must not 
walk here with you two men. Fifty 
people have noticed her.” 

Winterbourne raised his eyebrows. “I 
think it’s a pity to make too much fuss 
about it.” 

“It’s a pity to let the girl ruin herself!” 

“She is very innocent,” said Winter- 
bourne. 


83 



“ She’s very crazy !” cried Mrs. Walker. 
“Did you ever see anything so imbecile 
as her mother? After you had all left 
me just now I could • not sit still for 
thinking of it. It seemed too pitiful 
not even to attempt to save her. I order- 
ed the carriage and put on my bonnet, 
and came here as quickly as possible. 
Thank Heaven I have found you !” 

“ What do you propose to do with us?” 
asked Winterbourne, smiling, 

“To ask her to get in, to drive 
her about here for half an hour, 
so that the world may see 
that she is not running ab- 
solutely wild, and then to 
take her safely home.” 

“ I don’t think it’s a 
very happy thought,” said 
Winterbourne; “but you 
can try.” 


Mrs. Walker tried. The young man 
went in pursuit of Miss Miller, who had 
simply nodded and smiled at his inter- 
locutor in the carriage, and had gone her 
way with her companion. Daisy, on 
learning that Mrs. Walker wished to 
speak to her, retraced her steps with a 
perfect good grace and with Mr. Giova- 
nelli at her side. She declared that she 
was delighted to have a chance to present 
this gentleman to Mrs. Walker. She im- 
mediately achieved the introduction, and 
declared that she had never in her life 
6een anything so lovely as Mrs. Walker’s 
carriage-rug. 

“I am glad you admire it,” said this 
lady, smiling sweetly. “ Will you get in 
and let me put it over you ?” 

“ Oh no, thank you,” said Daisy. “ I 
shall admire it much more as I see you 
driving round with it.” 

“ Do set in and drive with me 1” said 
Mrs. Walker. 

“ That would be charming, but it’s so 
enchanting just as I am !” and Daisy gave 
a brilliant glance at the gentlemen on 
either side of her. 

“It may be enchanting, dear child, but 
it is not the custom here,” urged Mrs. 

85 


Walker, leaning forward in her victoria, 
with her hands devoutly clasped. 

“Well, it ought to be, then!” said 
Daisy. “ If I didn’t walk I should ex- 
pire.” 

“You should walk with your mother, 
dear,” cried the lady from Geneva, losing 
patience. 

“With ray mother, dear!” exclaimed 
the young girl. Winterbourne saw that 
she scented interference. “ My mother 
never walked ten steps in her life. And 
then, you know,” she added, with a laugh, 
“ I am more than five years old.” 

“ You are old enough to be more rea- 
sonable. You are old enough, dear Miss 
Miller, to be talked about.” 

Daisy looked at Mrs. Walker, smiling 
intensely. “Talked about? What do 
you mean ?” 

“ Come into my carriage, and I will 
tell you.” 

Daisy turned her quickened glance 
again from one of the gentlemen beside 
her to the other. Mr. Giovanelli was bow- 
ing to and fro, rubbing down his gloves 
and laughing very agreeably; Winter- 
bourne thought it a most unpleasant 
scene. “I don’t think I want to know 


what you mean,” said Daisy, presently. 
“ I don’t think 1 should like it.” 

Winterbourne wished that Mrs. Walk- 
er would tuck in her carriage -rug and 
drive away ; but this lady did not enjoy 
being defied, as she afterwards told him. 
“Should you prefer being thought a very 
reckless girl ?” she demanded. 

“ Gracious !” exclaimed Daisy. She 
looked again at Mr. Giovanelli, then she 
turned to Winterbourne. There was a 
little pink flush in her cheek ; she was 
tremendously pretty. “Does Mr. Win- 
terbourne think,” she asked slowly, smil- 
ing, throwing back her head and glancing 
at him from head to foot, “ that, to save 
my reputation, I ought to get into the 
carriage ?” 

Winterbourne colored ; for an instant 
he hesitated greatly. It seemed so strange 
to hear her speak that way of her “ repu- 
tation.” But he himself, in fact, must 
speak in accordance with gallantry. The 
finest gallantry here was simply to tell 
her the truth, and the truth for Winter- 
bourne — as the few indications I have 
been able to give have made him known 
to the reader — was that Daisy Miller 
should take Mrs. Walker’s advice. He 

87 


looked at her exquisite prettiness, and 
then said, very gently, “ I think you should 
get into the carriage.” 

Daisy gave a violent laugh. “ I never 
heard anything so stiff! If this is im- 
proper, Mrs. Walker,” she pursued, “then 
I am all improper, and you must give 
me up. Good-bye ; I hope you’ll have a 
lovely ride!” and, with Mr. Giovanelli, 
who made a triumphantly obsequious sa- 
lute, she turned away. 

Mrs. Walker sat looking after her, and 
there were tears in Mrs. Walker’s eyes. 
“ Get in here, sir,” she said to Winter- 
bourne, indicating the place beside her. 
The young man answered that he felt 
bound to accompany Miss Miller ; where- 
upon Mrs. Walker declared that if he re- 
fused her this favor she would never 
speak to him again. She was evidently 
in earnest. Winterbourne overtopk Daisy 
and her companion, and, offering the young 
girl his hand, told her that Mrs. Walker 
had made an imperious claim upon his 
society. He expected that in answer she 
would say something rather free, some- 
thing to commit herself still further to 
that “ recklessness ” from which Mrs. 
Walker had so charitably endeavored to 


dissuade her. But she only shook his 
hand, hardly looking at him ; while Mr. 
Giovanelli bade him farewell with a too 
emphatic flourish of the hat. 

Winterbourne was not in the best pos- 
sible humor as he took his seat in Mrs. 
Walker’s victoria. “ That was not clever 
of you,” he said, candidly, while the vehi- 
cle mingled again with the throng of car- 
riages. 

u In such a case,” his companion an- 
swered, “ I don’t wish to be clever; I 
wish to be earnest /” 

“Well, your earnestness has only of- 
fended her and put her off.” 

“ It has happened very well,” said Mrs. 
Walker. “If she is so perfectly deter- 
mined to compromise herself, the sooner 
one knows it the better; one can act ac- 
cordingly.” 

“I suspect she meant no harm,” Win- 
terbourne rejoined. 

“ So I thought a month ago. But she 
has been going too far.” 

“ What has she been doing?” 

“ Everything that is not done here. 
Flirting with any man she could pick 
up ; sitting in corners with mysterious 
Italians; dancing all the evening with 



the same partners ; receiving visits at 
eleven o’clock at night. Her mother 
goes away when visitors come.” 

“ But her brother,” said Winterbourne, 
laughing, “ sits up till midnight.” 

“ He must be edified by what he sees. 
I’m told that at their hotel every one is 
talking about her, and that a smile goes 
round among all the servants when a gen- 
tleman comes and asks for Miss Miller.” 

“ The servants be hanged !” said Win- 
terbourne, angrily. “ The poor girl’s only 
fault,” he presently added, “ is that she 
is very uncultivated.” 

“ She is naturally indelicate,” Mrs. 
Walker declared. “Take that example 
this morning. How long had you known 
her at Vevay ?” 

“A couple of days.” 

“ Fancy, then, her making it a 
personal matter that you should 
have left the place !” 
Winterbourne was silent for some 
moments ; then he said, “ I suspect, 
Mrs. Walker, that you and I have lived 
too long at Geneva!” And he added a 
request that she should inform him with 
what particular design she had made 
him enter her carriage. 




“ I wished to beg you to cease your re- 
lations with Miss Miller — not to flirt with 
her — to give her no further opportunity 
to expose herself — to let her alone, in 
short.” 

“ I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Win- 
terbourne. “ I like her extremely.” 

“ All the more reason that you shouldn’t 
help her to make a scandal.” 

“ There shall be nothing scandalous in 
my attentions to her.” 

“There certainly will be in the way 
she takes them. But I have said what I 
had on my conscience,” Mrs. Walker pur- 
sued. “ If you wish to rejoin the young 
lady I will put you down. Here, by-the- 
way, you have a chance.” 

The carriage was traversing that part 
of the Pincian Garden that overhangs the 
wall of Pome and overlooks the beautiful 
Villa Borghese. It is bordered by a 
large parapet, near which there are sev- 
eral seats. One of the seats at a distance 
was occupied by a gentleman and a lady, 
towards whom Mrs. Walker gave a toss 
of her head. At the same moment these 
persons rose and walked towards the par- 
apet. Winterbourne had asked the coach- 
man to stop ; he now descended from 

91 


the carriage. His companion looked at 
him a moment in silence ; then, while he 
raised his hat, she drove majestically 
away. Winterbourne stood there ; he had 
turned his eyes towards Daisy and her 
cavalier. They evidently saw no one; 
they were too deeply occupied with each 
other. When they reached the low gar- 
den-wall they stood a moment looking off 
at the great flat-topped pine-clusters of 
the Villa. Borghese ; then Giovanelli seated 
himself familiarly upon the broad ledge 
of the wall. The western sun in the op- 
posite sky sent out a brilliant shaft through 
a couple of cloud-bars, whereupon Daisy’s 
companion took her parasol out of her 
hands and opened it. She came a little 
nearer, and he held the parasol over her ; 
then, still holding it, he let it rest upon 
her shoulder, so that both of their heads 
were hidden from Winterbourne. This 
young man lingered a moment, then he 
began to walk. But he walked — not 
towards the couple with the parasol — 
towards the residence of his aunt, Mrs. 
Costello. 

He flattered himself on the following 
day that there was no smiling among the 
servants when he, at least, asked for Mrs. 











»• 


/ 




/ 



























V 












♦ 

































































» 










Miller at her hotel. This lady and her 
daughter, however, were not at home ; 
and on the next day after, repeating his 
visit, Winterbourne again had the mis- 
fortune not to find them. Mrs. Walker’s 
party took place on the evening of the 
third day, and, in spite of the frigidity 
of his last interview with the hostess, 
Winterbourne was among the guests. 
Mrs. Walker was one of those American 
ladies who, while residing abroad, make a 
point, in their own phrase, of studying 
European society; and she had on this 
occasion collected several specimens of 
her diversely-born fellow-mortals to serve, 
as it were, as text-books. When Winter- 
borne arrived, Daisy Miller was not there, 
but in a few moments he saw her mother 
come in alone, very shyly and ruefully., 
Mrs. Miller’s hair above her exposed- 
looking temples was more frizzled than 
ever. As she approached Mrs. Walker, 
Winterbourne also drew near. 

“ You see I’ve come all alone,” said 
poor Mrs. Miller. “ I’m so frightened 
I don’t know what to do. It’s the first 
time I’ve ever been to a party alone, es- 
pecially in this country. 1 wanted to 
bring Randolph, or Eugenio, or some one, 

95 


but Daisy just pushed me off by myself. 
I ain’t used to going round alone.” 

“And does not your daughter intend 
to favor us with her society ?” demanded 
Mrs. Walker, impressively. 

“Well, Daisy’s all dressed,” said Mrs. 
Miller, with that accent of the dispassion- 
ate, if not of the philosophic, historian 
with which she always recorded the cur- 
rent incidents of her daughter’s career. 
“ She got dressed on purpose before din- 
ner. But she’s got a friend of hers there; 
that gentleman — the Italian — that she 
wanted to bring. They’ve got going at 
the piano; it seems as if they couldn’t 
leave off. Mr. Giovanelli sings splendid- 
ly. But I guess they’ll come before very 
long,” concluded Mrs. Miller, hopefully. 

“I’m sorry she should come in that 
way,” said Mrs. Walker. 

“Well, I told her that there was no 
use in her getting dressed before dinner 
if she was going to wait three hours,” re- 
sponded Daisy’s mamma. “ I didn’t see 
the use of her putting on such a dress as 
that to sit round with Mr. Giovanelli.” 

“ This is most horrible !” said Mrs. 
Walker, turning away and addressing her- 
self to Winterbourne. “ EUe s'affiche. It’s 


her revenge for my having ventured 
to remonstrate with her. When she 
comes I shall not speak to her.” 

Daisy came after eleven o’clock ; 
but she was not, on such an occasion, 
a young lady to wait to be spoken to. 
She rustled forward in radiant loveli- 
ness, smiling and chattering, carrying 
a large bouquet, and attended by Mr. 
Giovanelli. Every one stopped talk- 
ing, and turned and looked at her. 
She came straight to Mrs. Walker. 
“ I’m afraid you thought I never was 
coming, so I sent mother off to tell 
you. I wanted to make Mr. Giova- 
nelli practise some things before he 
came ; you know he sings beautifully, 
and I want you to ask him to sing. 
This is Mr. Giovanelli; you know I 
introduced him to you ; he’s got the 
most lovely voice, and he knows the 
most charming set of songs. I made 
him go over them this evening on pur- 
pose ; we had the greatest time at the 
hotel.” Of all this Daisy delivered 
herself with the sweetest, brightest 
Miidibleness, looking now at her host- 
97 


ess and now round the room, while she 
gave a series of little pats round her 
shoulders to the edges of her dress. “ Is 
there any one I know ?” she asked. 

“ I think every one knows you !” said 
Mrs. Walker, pregnantly, and she gave a 
very cursory greeting to Mr. Giovanelli. 
This gentleman bore himself gallantly. 
He smiled and bowed, and showed his 
white teeth ; he curled his mustaches and 
rolled his eyes, and performed all the 
proper functions of a handsome Italian 
at an evening party. He sang very pret- 
tily half a dozen songs, though Mrs. 
Walker afterwards declared that she had 
been quite unable to find out who asked 
him. It was apparently hot Daisy who 
had given him his orders. Daisy sat at a 
distance from the piano ; and though she 
had publicly, as it were, professed a high 
admiration for his singing, talked, not in- 
audibly, while it was going on. 

“ It’s a pity these rooms are so small ; 
we can’t dance,” she said to Winter- 
bourne, as if she had seen him five min- 
utes before. 

“ I am not sorry we can’t dance,” Win- 
terbourne answered ; “ I don’t dance.” 

“ Of course you don’t dance ; you’re 

98 


too stiff,” said Miss Daisy. “I hope you 
enjoyed your drive with Mrs. Walker!” 

“No, I didn’t enjoy it; I preferred 
walking with you.” 

“ We paired off ; that was much better,” 
said Daisy. “ But did you ever hear any- 
thing so cool as Mrs. Walker’s wanting 
me to get into her carriage and drop poor 
Mr. Giovanelli, and under the pretext 
that it was proper? People have differ- 
ent ideas ! It would have been most un- 
kind ; he had been talking about that 
walk for ten days.” 

“He should not have talked about it 
at all,” said Winterbourne; “he would 
never have proposed to a young lady of 
this country to walk about the streets 
with him.” 

“About the streets?” cried Daisy, with 
her pretty stare. “ Where, then, would 
he have proposed to her to walk? The 
Pincio is not the streets, either; and I, 
thank goodness, am not a young lady of 
this country. The young ladies of this 
country have a dreadfully poky time of 
it, so far as I can learn ; I don’t see why 
I should change my habits for them” 

“ I am afraid your habits are those of 
a flirt,” said Winterbourne, gravely. 



“ Of course they are,” she cried, giving 
him her little smiling stare again. “ I’m 
a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever 
hear of a nice girl that was not ? But I 
suppose you will tell me now that I am 
not a nice girl.” 

“ You’re a very nice girl ; but I wish 
you would flirt with me, and me only,” 
said Winterbourne. 

“Ah! thank you — thank you veiy 
much; you are the last man I should 
think of flirting with. As I have had 
the pleasure of informing you, you are 
too stiff.” 


100 


“You say that too often,” said Winter- 
bourne. 

Daisy gave a delighted laugh. “ If I 
could have the sweet hope of making you 
angry, I should say it again.” 

“ Don’t do that ; when I am angry I’m 
stiffer than ever. But if you won’t flirt 
with me, do cease, at least, to flirt with 
your friend at the piano ; they don’t 
understand that sort of thing here.” 

“ I thought they understood nothing 
else !” exclaimed Daisy. 

“ Not in young unmarried women.” 

“ It seems to me much more proper in 
young unmarried women than in old mar- 
ried ones,” Daisy declared. 

“Well,” said Winterbourne, “when 
you deal with natives you must go by the 
custom of the place. Flirting is a purely 
American custom ; it doesn’t exist here. 
So when you show yourself in public 
with Mr. Giovanelli, and without your 
mother — ” 

“ Gracious ! poor mother !” interposed 
Daisy. 

“ Though you may be flirting, Mr. 
Giovanelli is not; he means something 
else.” 

“ He isn’t preaching, at any rate,” said 
101 


Daisy, with vivacity. “ And if you want 
very much to know, we are neither of us 
flirting ; we are too good friends for that : 
we are very intimate friends.’’ 

“ Ah !’ r rejoined Winterbourne, “ if you 
are in love with each other, it is another 
affair.” 

She had allowed him up to this point 
to talk so frankly that he had no expec- 
tation of shocking her by this ejacula- 
tion ; but she immediately got up, blush- 
ing visibly, and leaving him to exclaim 
mentally that little American flirts were 
the queerest creatures in the world. “ Mr. 
Giovanelli, at least,” she said, giving her 
interlocutor a single glance, “ never says 
such very disagreeable things to me.” 

Winterbourne was bewildered ; he stood 
staring. Mr. Giovanelli had finished sing- 
ing. He left the piano and came over to 
Daisy. “ Won’t you come into the other 
room and have some tea?” he asked, ^ 
bending before her with his ornamental 
smile. 

Daisy turned to Winterbourne, begin- 
ning to smile again. lie was still more 
perplexed, for this inconsequent smile 
made nothing clear, though it seemed to 
prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness 
102 


and softness that reverted instinctively to 
the pardon of offences. “ It has never 
occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer 
me any tea,” she said, with her little tor- 
menting manner. 

“I have offered you advice,” Winter- 
bourne rejoined. 

“ I prefer weak tea !” cried Daisy, and 
she went off with the brilliant Giovanelli. 
She sat with him in the adjoining room, 
in the embrasure of the window, for the 
rest of the evening. There was an in- 
teresting performance at the piano, but 
neither of these young people gave heed 
to it. When Daisy came to take leave of 
Mrs. Walker, this lady conscientiously 
repaired the weakness of which she had 
been guilty at the moment of the young 
gild’s arrival. She turned her back straight 
upon Miss Miller, and left her to depart 
with what grace she might. Winter- 
bourne was standing near the door; he 
saw it all. Daisy turned very pale, and 
looked at her mother; but Mrs. Miller 
was humbly unconscious of any violation 
of the usual social forms. She appeared, 
indeed, to have felt an incongruous im- 
pulse to draw attention to her own striking 
observance of them. “ Good-night, Mrs. 

103 



-< 


Walker,” she said; “ we’ve had a beauti- 
ful evening. You see, if I let Daisy come 
to parties without me, I don’t want her 
to go away without me.” Daisy turned 
away, looking with a pale, grave face at 
the circle near the door; Winterbourne 
saw that, for the first moment, she was 
too much shocked and puzzled even for 
indignation. He on his side was greatly 
touched. 

“ That was very cruel,” he said to Mrs. 
W alker. 

“She never enters my drawing-room 
again !” replied his hostess. 

Since Winterbourne was not to meet 
her in Mrs. Walker’s drawing-room, he 
w’ent as often as possible to Mrs. Miller’s 
hotel. The ladies were rarely at home ; 
but when he found them the devoted 
Giovanelli was always present. Very 
often the brilliant little Homan was in 
the drawing-room with Daisy alone, Mrs. 
Miller being apparentl}- constantly of the 
opinion that discretion is the better part 
of surveillance. Winterbourne noted, at 
first with surprise, that Daisy on these 
occasions was never embarrassed or an- 
noyed by his own entrance ; but he very 
presently began to feel that she had no 

104 


» 


more surprises for him ; the unexpected 
in her behavior was the only thing to ex- 
pect. She showed no displeasure at her 
tete-a-tete with Giovanelli being inter- 
rupted ; she could chatter as freshly and 
freely with two gentlemen as with one; 
there was always, in her conversation, the 
same odd mixture of audacity and pue- 
rility. Winterbourne remarked to him- 
self that if she was seriously interested in 
Giovanelli, it was very singular that she 
should not take more trouble to preserve 
the sanctity of their interviews ; and he 
liked her the more for her innocent-look- 
ing indifference and her apparently inex- 
haustible good-humor. He could hardly 
have said why, but she seemed to him a 
girl who would never be jealous. At 
the risk of exciting a somewhat derisive 
smile on the reader’s part, I may affirm 
that with regard to the women who had 
hitherto interested him, it very often 
seemed to Winterbourne among the possi- 
bilities that, given certain contingencies, 
he should be afraid — literally afraid — of 
these ladies; he had a pleasant sense that 
he should never be afraid of Daisy Miller. 
It must be added that this sentiment was 
not altogether flattering to Daisy ; it was 


•ft 


part of bis conviction, or rather of 
his apprehension, that she would 
prove a. very light young person. 

But she was evidently very 
much interested in Giovanelli. 

She looked at him whenever he 
spoke ; she was perpetually tell- 
ing him to do this and to do that ; 
she was constantly “ chaffing ” and 
abusing him. She appeared com- 
pletely to have forgotten that 
Winterbourne had said anything 
to displease her at Mrs. Walker’s 
little party. One Sunday after- 
noon, having gone to St. Peter’s 
with his aunt, Winterbourne per- 
ceived Daisy strolling about the 
great church in company 
with the inevitable Giova- 
nelli. Presently he point- 
ed out the young girl and 
her cavalier to Mrs. Costel- 
lo. This lady looked at them a moment 
through her eye-glass, and then she said, 
“ That’s what makes you so pensive in 
these days, eh ?” 


106 


“ I bad not the least idea I was pen- 
sive,” said the young man. 

“ You are very much preoccupied ; you 
are thinking of something.” 

“ And wliat is it,” he asked, “ that you 
accuse me of thinking of?” 

“ Of that young lady’s — Miss Baker’s, 
Miss Chandler’s — what’s her name? — 
Miss Miller’s intrigue with that little bar- 
ber’s block.” 

“Do you call it an intrigue,” Winter- 
bourne asked — “an affair that goes on 
with such peculiar publicity?” 

“ That’s their folly,” said Mrs. Costello; 
“it’s not their merit.” 

“No,” rejoined Winterbourne, with 
something of that pensiveness to which 
his aunt had alluded. “ I don’t believe 
that there is anything to be called an 
intrigue.” 

“ I have heard a dozen people speak of 
it; they say she is quite carried away by 
him.” 

“ They are certainly very intimate,” 
said Winterbourne. 

Mrs. Costello inspected the young 
couple again with her optical instrument. 
“ He is very handsome. One easily sees 
how it is. She thinks him the most ele- 

107 


gant man in the world — the finest gentle- 
man. She has never seen anything like 
him ; he is better, even, than the courier. 
It was the courier, probably, who intro- 
duced him ; and if he succeeds in marrying 
the young lady, the courier will come in 
for a magnificent commission.” 

“ I don’t believe she thinks of marrying 
him,” said Winterbourne, “and I don’t 
believe he hopes to marry her.” 

“You may be very sure she thinks of 
nothing. She goes on from day to day, 
from hour to hour, as they did in the 
Golden Age. I can imagine nothing more 
vulgar. And at the same time,” added 
-Mrs. Costello, “ depend upon it that she 
may tell you any moment that she is 
‘ engaged.’ ” 

“ I think that is more than Giovanelli 
expects,” said Winterbourne. 

“ Who is Giovanelli ?” 

“ The little Italian. I have asked ques- 
tions about him, and learned something. 
He is apparently a perfectly respect- 
able little man. I believe he is, in a 
small way, a cavalier e avvocato. But he 
doesn’t move in what are called the first 
circles. I think it is really not absolutely 

impossible that the courier introduced 
108 





t 


I 














































t 































































































% 





him. He is evidently immensely 
g#; charmed with Miss Miller. If 
she thinks him the finest gen- 
tleman in the world, he, on his 
side, has never found himself in per- 
sonal contact with such splendor, 
such opulence, such expensiveness, 
as this young lady’s. And then she 
must seem to him wonderfully pret- 
ty and interesting. I rather doubt 
that he dreams of marrying her. 
That must appear to him too im- 
possible a piece of luck. He has 
nothing but his handsome face to 
offer, and there is a substantial Mr. 
Miller in that mysterious land of 
dollars. Giovanelli knows that he 
hasn’t a title to offer. If he were 
only a count or a marchese ! He 





must wonder at liis luck, at the way they 
have taken him up.” 

“ He accounts for it by his handsome 
face, and thinks Miss Miller a young lady 
qui se passe ses fantaisies /” said Mrs. 
Costello. 

“ It is very true,” Winterbourne pur- 
sued, “ that Daisy and her mamma have 
not yet risen to that stage of — what shall 
I call it ? — of culture, at which the idea 
of catching a count or a marchese begins. 
I believe that they are intellectually in- 
capable of that conception.” 

“ Ah ! but the avvocato can’t believe 
it,” said Mrs. Costello. 

Of the observation excited by Daisy’s 
“intrigue,” Winterbourne gathered that 
day at St. Peter’s sufficient evidence. A 
dozen of the American colonists in Rome 
came to talk with Mrs. Costello, who sat 
on a little portable stool at the base of 
one of the great pilasters. The vesper 
service was going forward in splendid 
chants and organ -tones in the adjacent 
choir, and meanwhile, between Mrs. Cos- 
tello and her friends, there was a great 
deal said about poor little Miss Miller’s 
going really “too far.” Winterbourne 
was not pleased with what he heard ; but 
112 


when, coming out upon the great steps 
of the church, lie saw Daisy, who had 
emerged before him, get into an open 
cab with her accomplice and roll away 
through the cynical streets of Home, he 
could not deny to himself that she was 
going very far indeed. He felt very 
sorry for her — not exactly that he be- 
lieved that she had completely lost her 
head, but because it was painful to hear 
so much that was pretty and undefended 
and natural assigned to a vulgar place 
among the categories of disorder. He 
made an attempt after this to give a hint 
to Mrs. Miller. He met one day in the 
Corso a friend, a tourist like himself, who 
had just come out of the Doria Palace, 
where he had been walking through the 
beautiful gallery. His friend talked for 
a moment about the superb portrait of 
Innocent X., by Yelasquez, which hangs 
in one of the cabinets of the palace, and 
then said, “ And in the same cabinet, by- 
the-way, I had the pleasure of contem- 
plating a picture of a different kind — that 
pretty American girl whom you pointed 
out to me last week.” In answer to 
Winterbourne’s inquiries, his friend nar- 
rated that the pretty American girl — 

113 


prettier than ever — was seated with a 
companion in the secluded nook in which 
the great papal portrait was enshrined. 

“ Who was her companion ?” asked 
Winterbourne. 

“ A little Italian with a bouquet in his 
button-hole. The girl is delightfully pret- 
ty ; but I thought I understood from you 
the other day that she was a young lady 
du meilleur monde .” 

“So she is!” answered Winterbourne; 
and having assured himself that his in- 
formant had seen Daisy and her compan- 
ion but five minutes before, he jumped 
into a cab and went to call on Mrs. Miller. 
She was at home ; but she apologized to 
him for receiving him in Daisy’s absence. 

“She’s gone out somewhere with Mr. 
Giovanelli,” said Mrs. Miller. “ She’s al- 
ways going round with Mr. Giovanelli.” 

“ I have noticed that they are very in- 
timate,” Winterbourne observed. 

“ Oh, it seems as if they couldn’t live 
without each other!” said Mrs. Miller. 
“ Well, he’s a real gentleman, anyhow. I 
keep telling Daisy she’s engaged !” 

“ And what does Daisy say?” 

“ Oh, she says she isn’t engaged. But 
she might as well be!” this impartial 

114 


parent resumed ; “ slie goes on as if she 
! was. But I’ve made Mr. Giovanelli 
I promise to tell me, if she doesn’t. I 
should want to write to Mr. Miller 
about it — shouldn’t you ?” 

Winterbourne replied that he cer- 
tainly should ; and the state of mind 
of Daisy’s mamma struck him as so 
unprecedented in the annals of parent- 
al vigilance that he gave up as utterly 
irrelevant the attempt to place her 
upon her guard. 

After this Daisy was never at home, 
and Winterbourne ceased to meet her 
at the houses of their common acquaint- 
ances, because, as he perceived, these 
shrewd people had quite made up their 
minds that she was going too far. They 
ceased to invite her; and they intimat- 
ed that they desired to express to ob- 
servant Europeans the great truth that, 
though Miss Daisy Miller was a young 
American lady, her behavior was not 
representative — was regarded by her 
compatriots as abnormal. Winter- 
bourne wondered how she felt about 
all the cold shoulders that were turned 
towards her, and sometimes it annoyed 


him to suspect that she did not feel at 
all. He said to himself that she was too 
light and childish, too uncultivated and 
unreasoning, too provincial, to have re- 
flected upon her ostracism, or even to 
have perceived it. Then at other mo- 
ments he believed that she carried about 
in her elegant and irresponsible little or- 
ganism a defiant, passionate, perfectly ob- 
servant consciousness of the impression 
she produced. He asked himself whether 
Daisy’s defiance came from the conscious- 
ness of innocence, or from her being, es- 
sentially, a young person of the reckless 
class. It must be admitted that holding 
one’s self to a belief in Daisy’s “inno- 
cence” came to seem to Winterbourne 
more and more a matter of fine-spun gal- 
lantry. As I have already had occasion 
to relate, he was angry at finding him- 
self reduced to chopping logic about 
this young lady ; he was vexed at his 
want of instinctive certitude as to how 
far her eccentricities were generic, na- 
tional, and how far they were personal. 
From either view of them he had some- 
how missed her, and now it was too late. 
She was “ carried away ” by Mr. Giova- 
nelli. 


113 


A few days after his brief interview 
with her mother, he encountered her in 
that beautiful abode of flowering desola- 
tion known as the Palace of the Caesars. 
The early Roman spring had filled the air 
with bloom and perfume, and the rugged 
surface of the Palatine was muffled with 
tender verdure. Daisy was strolling along 
the top of one of those great mounds of 
ruin that are embanked with mossy mar- 
ble and paved with monumental inscrip- 
tions. It seemed to him that Rome had 
never been so lovely as just then. He 
stood looking off at the enchanting har- 
mony of line and color that remotely en- 
circles the city, inhaling the softly humid 
odors, and feeling the freshness of the 
year and the antiquity of the place reaf- 
firm themselves in mysterious interfusion. 
It seemed to him, also, that Daisy had 
never looked so pretty ; but this had been 
an observation of his whenever he met 
her. Giovanelli was at her side, and Gio- 
vanelli, too, wore an aspect of even un- 
wonted brilliancy. 

“ Well,” said Daisy, “ I should think 
you would be lonesome !” 

“Lonesome?” asked Winterbourne. 

“ You are always going round by your- 

117 


self. Can’t you get any one to walk with 
you ?” 

“I am not so fortunate,” said Winter- 
bourne, “as your companion.” 

Giovanelli, from the first, had treated 
Winterbourne with distinguished polite- 
ness. He listened with a deferential air 
to his remarks ; he laughed punctiliously 
at his pleasantries ; he seemed disposed 
to testify to his belief that Winterbourne 
was a superior young man. He carried 
himself in no degree like a jealous wooer ; 
he had obviously a great deal of tact ; he 
had no objection to your expecting a lit- 
tle humility of him. It even seemed to 
Winterbourne at times that Giovanelli 
would find a certain mental relief in be- 
ing able to have a private understanding 
with him — to say to him, as an intelligent 
man, that, bless you, he knew how extraor- 
dinary was this young lady, and didn’t 
flatter himself with delusive — or, at least, 
too delusive — hopes of matrimony and 
dollars. On this occasion he strolled away 
from his companion to pluck a sprig of 
almond-blossom, which lie carefully ar- 
ranged in his button-hole. 

“ I know why you say that,” said Daisy, 
watching Giovanelli. “ Because you think 
118 





I go round too much with him” And 
she nodded at her attendant. 

“ Every one thinks so — if you care 
to know,” said Winterbourne. 

“Of course I care to know !” Daisy 
exclaimed, seriously. “ But I don’t 
believe it. They are only pretending 
to be shocked. They don’t really care 
a straw what I do. Besides, I don’t 
go round so much.” 

“ I think yon will find they do care. 
They will show it disagreeably.” 

Daisy looked at him a moment. 
“How disagreeably ?” 

“Haven’t you noticed anything?” 
Winterbourne asked. 

“I have noticed you. But I no- 
ticed you were as stiff as an umbrella 
the first time I saw you.” 

“You will find I am not so stiff as 
several others,” said Winterbourne, 
smiling. 

“How shall I find it?” 

“ By going to see the others.” 

“ What will they do to me ?” 

“ They will give you the cold shoul- 
der. Do you know what that means ?” 

Daisy was looking at him intently; 
she began to color. 


“ Do you mean as Mrs. Walker did the 
other night ?” 

“Exactly !” said Winterbourne. 

She looked away at Giovanelli, who 
was decorating himself with his almond- 
blossom. Then, looking back at Winter- 
bourne, “I shouldn’t think you would let 
people be so unkind !” she said. 

“ How can I help it ?” he asked. 

“I should think you would say some- 
thing.” 

“ I did say something and he paused 
a moment. “I say that your mother tells 
me that she believes you are engaged.” 

“Well, she does,” said Daisy, very 
simply. 

Winterbourne began to laugh. “And 
does Randolph believe it?” he asked. 

“ I guess Randolph doesn’t believe any- 
thing,” said Daisy. Randolph’s scepti- 
cism excited Winterbourne to further 
hilarity, and he observed that Giovanelli 
was coming back to them. Daisy, ob- 
serving it too, addressed herself again to 
her countryman. “ Since you have men- 
tioned it,” she said, “ I am engaged.” . . . 
Winterbourne looked at her; he had 
stopped laughing. “You don’t believe 
it !” she added. 


120 


He was silent a moment ; and then, 
“ Yes, I believe it,” lie said. 

“ Oh no, you don’t !” she answered. 
“ Well, then — I am not!” 

The young girl and her cicerone were 
on their way to the gate of the enclosure, 
so that Winterbourne, who had but lately 
entered, presently took leave of them. 
A week afterwards he went to dine at a 
beautiful villa on the Cselian Hill, and, 
on arriving, dismissed his hired vehicle. 
The evening was charming, and he prom- 
ised himself the satisfaction of walking 
home beneath the Arch of Constantine 
and past the vaguely-lighted monuments 
of the Forum. There was a waning moon 
in the sky, and her radiance was not brill- 
iant, but she was veiled in a thin cloud- 
curtain which seemed to diffuse and equal- 
ize it. When, on his return from the 
villa (it was eleven o’clock), Winterbourne 
approached the dusky circle of the Col- 
osseum, it occurred to him, as a lover of 
the picturesque, that the interior, in the 
pale moonshine, would be well worth a 
glance. He turned aside and walked to 
one of the empty arches, near which, as 
he observed, an open carriage — one of 

the little Roman street-cabs — was sta- 
121 





tioned. Then lie passed in, among the 
cavernous shadows of the great structure, 
and emerged upon the clear and silent 
arena. The place had never seemed to 
him more impressive. One-half of the 
gigantic circus was in deep shade, the 



other was sleeping in the luminous dusk. 
As he stood there he began to murmur 
Byron’s famous lines, out of “Manfred 
but before he had finished his quotation 
he remembered that if nocturnal medita- 
tions in the Colosseum are recommended 
by the poets, they are deprecated by the 
doctors. The historic atmosphere was 
there, certainly ; but the historic atmos- 
phere, scientifically considered, was no 
better than a villanous miasma. Winter- 
bourne walked to the middle of the arena, 
to take a more general glance, intending 
thereafter to make a hasty retreat. The 
great cross in the centre was covered with 
shadow ; it was only as he drew near it that 
he made it out distinctly. Then he saw 
that two persons were stationed upon the 
low steps which formed its base. One of 
these was a woman, seated ; her compan- 
ion was standing in front of her. 

Presently the sound of the woman’s 
voice came to him distinctly in the warm 
night air. “Well, he looks at us as one 
of the old lions or tigers may have looked 
at the Christian martyrs !” These were 
the words he heard, in the familiar accent 
of Miss Daisy Miller. 

“ Let us hope he is not very hungry,” 

123 


responded the ingenious Giovanelli. “ He 
will have to take me first ; you will serve 
for dessert !” 

Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of 
horror, and, it must be added, with a sort 
of relief. It was as if a sudden illumina- 
tion had been flashed upon the ambiguity 
of Daisy’^ behavior, and the riddle had 
become easy to read. She was a young 
lady whom a gentleman need no longer 
be at pains to respect. He stood there 
looking at her — looking at her compan- 
ion, and not reflecting that though he saw 
them vaguely, he himself must have been 
more brightly visible. He felt angry 
with himself that he had bothered so 
much about the right way of regarding 
Miss Daisy Miller. Then, as he was go- 
ing to advance again, he checked himself ; 
not from the fear that he was doing her 
injustice, but from the sense of the dan- 
ger of appearing unbecomingly exhila- 
rated by this sudden revulsion from cau- 
tious criticism. He turned away towards 
the entrance of the place, but, as he did 
so, he heard Daisy speak again. 

u Why, it was Mr. Winterbourne ! He 
saw me, and he cuts me !” 

What a clever little reprobate she was, 

124 



and how smartly she played at injured 
innocence! But he wouldn’t cut her. 
Winterbourne came forward again, and 
went towards the great cross. Daisy had 
got up; Giovanelli lifted his hat. Win- 
terbourne had now begun to think simply 
of the craziness, from a sanitary point of 
view, of a delicate young girl loungihg 
away the evening in this nest of malaria. 
What if she were a clever little rep- 
robate? that was no reason for her dying 
of the jperniciosa. “ How long have 
you been here ?” he asked, almost 
brutally. 

Daisy, lovely in the flattering moon- 
light, looked at him a moment. Then 
— “ All the evening,” she answered, 
gently. . . . “ I never saw anything so 
pretty.” 

“I am afraid,” said Win- 
terbourne, “ that you will not 
think Roman fever very pret- 
ty. This is the way people 
catch it. I wonder,” he added, 
turning to Giovanelli, “that 




you, a native Roman, should countenance 
such a terrible indiscretion.” 

“ Ah,” said the handsome native, “ for 
myself I am not afraid.” 

“ Neither am I — for you! I am speak- 
ing for this young lady.” 

Giovanelli lifted his well-shaped eye- 
brows and showed his brilliant teeth. But 
he took Winterbourne’s rebuke with do- 
cility. “I told the signorina it was a 
grave indiscretion ; but when was the sign- 
orina ever prudent ?” 

“ I never was sick, and I don’t mean to 
be !” the signorina declared. “ I don’t 
look like much, but I’m healthy ! I was 
bound to see the Colosseum by moonlight ; 
I shouldn’t have wanted to go home with- 
out that ; and we have had the most beau- 
tiful time, haven’t we, Mr. Giovanelli ? If 
there has been any danger, Eugenio can 
give me some pills. He has got some 
splendid pills.” 

“I should advise you,” said Winter- 
bourne, “to drive home as fast as possi- 
ble and take one !” 

“What you say is very wise,” Giova- 
nelli rejoined. “I will go and make sure 
the carriage is at hand.” And he went 
forward rapidly. 


126 



Daisy followed with Winterbourne. 
He kept looking at her ; she seemed 
not in the least embarrassed. Win- 
terbourne said nothing ; Daisy chat- 
tered about the beauty of the place. 
“ Well, I have seen the Colosseum by 
moonlight !” she exclaimed. “That’s 
one good thing.” Then, noticing 
Winterbourne’s silence, she asked 
him why he didn’t speak. He made 
no answer; he only began to laugh. 
They passed under one of the dark 
archways ; Giovanelli was in front 
with the carriage. Here Daisy 
stopped a moment, looking at the 
young American. “ Did you believe 
I was engaged the other day?” she 
asked. 

“It doesn’t matter what I be- 
lieved the other day,” said 
Winterbourne, still laughing. 

“ Well, what do you be- 
lieve now?” 

“ I believe that it makes very lit 
tie difference whether you are en- 
gaged or not !’ ' 


P 


He felt the young girl’s pretty eyes 
fixed upon him through the thick gloom 
of the archway; she was apparently go- 
ing to answer. But Giovanelli hurried 
her forward. “ Quick ! quick !” he said ; 
“ if we get in by midnight we are quite 
safe.” 

Daisy took her seat in the carriage, and 
the fortunate Italian placed himself be- 
side her. “ Don’t forget Eugenio’s pills !” 
said Winterbourne, as he lifted his hat. 

“ I don’t care,” said Daisy, in a little 
strange tone, “ whether I have Roman 
fever or not !” Upon this the cab-driver 
cracked his whip, and they rolled away 
over the desultory patches of the antique 
pavement. 

Winterbourne, to do him justice, as it 
were, mentioned to no one that he had 
encountered Miss Miller, at midnight, in 
the Colosseum with a gentleman ; but, 
nevertheless, a couple of days later, the 
fact of her having been there under these 
circumstances was known to every mem- 
ber of the little American circle, and com- 
mented accordingly. Winterbourne re- 
flected that they had of course known it 
at the hotel, and that, after Daisy’s return, 
there had been an exchange of remarks 
128 


between the porter and the cab-driver. 
But the young man was conscious, at the 
same moment, that it had ceased to be a 
matter of serious regret to him that the 
little American flirt should be “talked 
about” by low-minded menials. These 
people, a day or two later, had serious in- 
formation to give : the little American 
flirt was alarmingly ill. Winterbourne, 
when the rumor came to him, immedi- 
ately went to the hotel for more news. 
He found that two or three charitable 
friends had preceded him, and that they 
were being entertained in Mrs. Miller’s 
salon by Randolph. 

“ It’s going round at night,” said Ran- 
dolph — “that’s what made her sick. She’s 
always going round at night. I shouldn’t 
think she’d want to, it’s so plaguy dark. 
You can’t see anything here at night, ex- 
cept when there’s a moon ! In America 
there’s always a moon !” Mrs. Miller was 
invisible ; she was now, at least, giving 
her daughter the advantage of her society. 
T t was evident that Daisy was dangerous- 
ly ill. 

Winterbourne went often to ask for 
news of her, and once he saw Mrs. Miller, 
who, though deeply alarmed, was, rather 

129 


to his surprise, perfectly composed, and, 
as it appeared, a most efficient and judi- 
cious nurse. She talked a good deal about 
Dr. Davis, but Winterbourne paid her the 
compliment of saying to himself that she 
was not, after all, such a monstrous goose. 
“Daisy spoke of you the other day,” she 
said to him. “Half the time she doesn’t 
know what she’s saying, but that time T 
think she did. She gave me a message. 
She told me to tell you — she told me to 
tell you that she never was engaged to 
that handsome Italian. I am sure I am 
very glad. Mr. Giovanelli hasn’t been 
near us since she was taken ill. I thought 
he was so much of a gentleman ; but I 
don’t call that very polite ! A lady told 
me that he was afraid I was angry with 
him for taking Daisy round at night. 
Well, so I am ; but I suppose he knows 
I’m a lady. I would scorn to scold him. 
Anyway, she says she’s not engaged. I 
don’t know why she wanted you to know ; 
but she said to me three times, ‘Mind 
you tell Mr. Winterbourne.’ And then 
she told me to ask if you remem berea 
the time you went to that castle in Switz- 
erland. But I said I wouldn’t give any 
such messages as that. Onl^, if she is 

130 



not engaged, I’m sure I’m glad to know 
it.” 

But, as Winterbourne had said, it mat- 
tered very little. A week after this the 
poor girl died ; it had been a terrible case 
of the fever. Daisy’s grave was in the 
little Protestant cemetery, in an angle of 
the wall of imperial Pome, beneath the 
cypresses and the thick spring -dowers. 
Winterbourne stood there beside it, with 


a number of other mourners — a number 
larger than the scandal excited by the 
young lady’s career would have led you 
to expect. Near him stood Giovanelli, 
who came nearer still before Winterbourne 
turned away. Giovanelli was very pale : 
on this occasion he had no flower in his 
button-hole ; he seemed to wish to say 
something. At last he said, “ She was 
the most beautiful young lady I ever 
saw, and the most amiable;” and then he 
added in a moment, “and she was the 
most innocent.” 

Winterbourne looked at him, and pres- 
ently repeated his words, “ And the most 
innocent ?” 

“The most innocent!” 

Winterbourne felt sore and angry. 
“ Why the devil,” he asked, “ did you 
take her to that fatal place ?” 

Mr. Giovanelli’s urbanity was appar- 
ently imperturbable. He looked on the 
ground a moment, and then he said, “ For 
myself I had no fear ; and she wanted to 
go.” 

“That was no reason!” Winterbourne 
declared. 

The subtle Homan again dropped his 
eyes. “ If she had lived, I should have 

132 


got nothing. She would never have mar- 
ried me, I am sure.” 

“ She would never have married you ?” 

“ For a moment I hoped so. But no. 
I am sure.” 

Winterbourne listened to him : he stood 
staring at the raw protuberance among 
the April daisies. When he turned away 
again, Mr. Giovanelli with his light, slow 
step, had retired. 

Winterbourne almost immediately left 
Borne ; but the following summer he 
again met his aunt, Mrs. Costello, at Ye- 
vay. Mrs. Costello was fond of Yevay. 
In the interval Winterbourne had often 
thought of Daisy Miller and her mystify- 
ing manners. One day he spoke of her to 
his aunt — said it was on his conscience 
that he had done her injustice. 

“I am sure I don’t know,” said Mrs. 
Costello. “ How did your injustice affect 
her ?” 

“She sent me a message before her 
death which I didn’t understand at the 
time ; but I have understood it since. She 
would have appreciated one’s esteem.” 

“ Is that a modest way,” asked Mrs. 
Costello, “ of saying that she would have 
reciprocated one’s affection ?” 

133 


Winterbourne offered no answer to this 
question; but lie presently said, “You 
were right in that remark that you made 
last summer. I was booked to make a 
mistake. I have lived too long in foreign 
parts.” 

Nevertheless, he went back to live at 
Geneva, whence there continue to come 
the most contradictory accounts of his 
motives of sojourn : a report that he is 
“studying” hard — an intimation that he 
is much interested in a very clever foreign 



















n c ^ 7 *> * s S ^ . , j C y o , v * A 

A°o c : ^Al;A A .‘° 

,< A ** = 



N C 


o5 A 

-s o i ri, y 

A * A v °tf> * 

v'\'A, " 



JJ- 

o 

? Cp C\ " t, 

0 N 0 4V ^ * JM< 

* v * o / ^c> 1 

.. ,v> r (? 5) ^ a, ; 

<>*» <A -v fAS&^/U ^ -V 

° • ^ ^ 

A 



_ Ovf\~ 


T> CP- <4 

^ ^ n I ^ «\ 

V ^ 0 * k < > 

- aV c 




A> \ 
L- * 





* ^ 

^ '*%>> S o 

A r ° 

- x° >■ 

* V ^ c* % 


Is v v a ^ ^VvVy • 

■'*\^\..,*e.'*A".’*AO 0 

V s, \Lo*J' * > .0* * 't * o , ^ 



0 N 0 


- * * S " 

^ ° 0 

*/* «v v ^ m.\! //yy^> 

O o x , +, 

.*■ . . Ik^. .%>Ar.->’ , 

■y. A* * 





0 v>‘ <P 
\V </> 

■' .>* » 

. - 0 , \ <y S a/w- 

y o * X * V \ O ^ 

* ^ A x C 0 N c « ' ? o * * S 

i ■< y V © , 

1 x> I *> <* 

o> ’'C*. ^ >- 

" a %. 'aw-.' o - ^v. *<m*z j? 

* s s * - / / % * 0 * 0 ' 0 <.° »ni^/ ,, 

— ^ "* ^ A ° * 0 / 'o V- A S V ? - 





> ' , .v o' 

%,'**'' J-' X<‘, A 



■* 



